NEW ACADEMIC PROGRAM PROPOSAL FOR DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES 1. PROGRAM DESCRIPTION AND PURPOSE a. Provide a brief description of the program as it will appear in the institution’s catalog. The bachelor of science degree in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences (DHSS) is an innovative, interdisciplinary major that combines information science and technologies with liberal arts training to provide students with the integrative literacies increasingly necessary for careers in cultural institutions, government, educational institutions, and technology firms. These transferable and sought-after capabilities ensure students leave RIT prepared for leadership as digital citizens. The DHSS program is a collaborative degree program. Students receive a strong foundation in critical thinking, cultural awareness, and communication in the College of Liberal Arts. This program offers a traditional liberal education, which is given new impact through engagement with digital technology. Coursework combines humanities and social science with computational and design training from the Golisano College for Computing and Information Science (GCCIS) and the College for Imaging Arts and Sciences (CIAS) in areas including human computer interaction, database management, geographic information technologies, and interactivity in new media. Students achieve both broad knowledge in digital humanities and social sciences and a specialization in an area of interest through their studies. Students benefit from experiential learning opportunities in one semester of cooperative education or an ternship, team project-based lab courses, and a capstone project. Students are encouraged to study abroad or pursue an international co-op in order to enhance their academic profile. b. Educational and Career Outcomes Educational Outcomes Through interdisciplinary coursework combining theory and application, students will: 1. Analyze the value of digital methods to the cultural record by thinking critically about tools, their uses, and limitations; 2. Interrogate digital information and evidence for validity, relevance, and best practices for attribution and transparency; DHSS Academic Program Proposal 3. Use computational approaches including information visualization, web design, markup, and social networking software; 4. Appraise computational tools and methodologies for use in humanities-based inquiry; 5. Identify the development stages of a media project and meet the needs and priorities in each stage of the project life-cycle; 6. Produce collaborative creative and critical publication, giving appropriate intellectual credit to all partners; 7. Recognize multiple audiences, academic and nonacademic, to determine the impact of digital work; 8. Formulate a humanities or social science-based inquiry and determine a digital platform or tool that will address the line of inquiry; 9. Explore notions of production, reception, circulation, and preservation of digital scholarship; 10. Assess participation in the “digital culture”: inclusion and exclusion, coercion and restriction. Career objectives Through specialization in specific fields and gaining experience through co-ops, students will: 1. Apply computing technologies to non-technical domains in order to manipulate, analyze, and present data in a modern, digital manner; 2. Be ready for careers in both the public and private sectors, spanning organizations ranging from technology sector mainstays (e.g., Google, IBM, Apple, Microsoft) to public institutions (government, museums, libraries) and entrepreneurial start-ups, depending on their area of specialization; 3. Be well-prepared for graduate-level work in a Digital Humanities and Social Sciences program or in a related field; 4. Employ a range of computational tools for humanities and social science; 5. Produce multi-authored media using interdisciplinary methodologies; 6. Be able to facilitate conversations between content experts and technologists on team projects in a variety of work environments; 7. Negotiate the transnational spaces created by new media across national borders and cultural divides. c. Fit with RIT mission, vision, values and reputation The proposed B.S. in DHSS embodies RIT’s Mission and Values. Central to RIT’s Mission is the rigorous pursuit of “new and emerging career areas.” Digital humanities, though it has gained much ground at the graduate research level, is still an emerging and 2 DHSS Academic Program Proposal innovative undergraduate career option that marries creativity to technical skills and critical thinking. The proposed DHSS program is driven by a project-based, team-oriented curriculum and pedagogy. In this sense, it embraces and practices “Student Centeredness” and “Teamwork and Collaboration.” Moreover, students are encouraged to link technical skills to areas of humanities and social science research and scholarship that is only in recent years benefiting from computational research approaches. Thus, DHSS exemplifies the value of “Professional Development and Scholarship.” The Value of “Integrity and Ethics” is part of the foundation of the program, not only in one of its core courses on “Ethics and Emerging Digital Scholarship,” but also across its curricular approach to questions of humanistic and social science research. Because of its integrated curriculum and its openness to allow students to double major, the degree infuses Innovation and Flexibility into RIT’s academic program portfolio. Finally, as is clear from even a cursory review of the humanities and social science research in “cyber studies” or “critical cyber studies,” much of the research on the internet’s promise and peril focuses on questions such as globalization, democratization, transnational cultures, and ethnic identities. In this sense, it opens up a curricular space for the consideration of “Respect, Diversity and Pluralism.” Students will be encouraged to see the ways that digital tools are also part of social and humanistic relations. Intersections of technology and the arts This program will be an attractor program, drawing students from the region and around the country looking for an education invested in the humanities, arts and social sciences, yet more career-oriented or technologically and professionally applicable than a traditional liberal arts education. The program will attract students eager to combine their liberal arts passion in almost any humanities-oriented discipline with an interest in Natural Language Processing, design graphics, visualization, interactive games, Human Computer Interaction, Geographic Information Systems, and social media. Also, this program will serve as an important retention program for RIT, allowing students who intend to double-major in a liberal arts field with, for instance, computer science, information technology, or new media design, to pursue interests that add to and supplement what is supported by their initial major program of study. Further, as a program increasing RIT/NTID-internal transfer retention, this program mitigates the loss of students who discover that they are not inclined to “technology-only” careers by allowing them to pursue broader cultural interests in tandem. Dynamic Educational Model The program is designed accordingly to support lifelong learning—the traditional hallmark of the humanities, and to develop a practical, yet adaptable, set of technical-computational skills that lead to immediate career paths. By providing a solid set of core 3 DHSS Academic Program Proposal competencies in the first two years, complemented by the subsequent exploration of tailored career trajectories and exposure to important career-oriented practices in the last two years, students will graduate with a perfect integration, valued in today’s workplace, between core competencies and specialized knowledge.1 New media and informatics offer unique opportunities for improving access for people with disabilities (hearing, visual, cognitive, or physical impairments) but also pose challenges. The program will contribute to training a new generation of innovators to think more deeply about the challenges of inclusion. The opportunity to study diversity and inclusion as these inform contemporary information cultures and practices may provide students, women in particular, who are historically underrepresented within the disciplinary models of computing and imaging arts and sciences with an alternate RIT site and career path. Preferred Candidates for Far-Sighted Employers Technologies are always social. Any historian of technology can point out numerous examples of technically superior tools that were never adopted due to inadequately considered social, economic and political conditions. The Digital Humanities are not just dedicated to the development of better tools that store, distribute and develop our humanistic traditions, they actively engage with and enable reasoning, learning and understanding about broader spatial, temporal, and cultural processes. The field not only examines possible technical limitations or improvements, but also takes into account a larger political economy and cultural context. The strength of such historically and culturally contingent analysis, as opposed to attention only to technical details, is that social critique is brought into the development of software and hardware. This is crucial when it comes to developing technologies that will actually be adopted by users, be they commercial users in corporate Beijing or kindergartners in Des Moines. The humanistic