uva mdst 3703 2013 08-27 introduction
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Introduction to the Digital Liberal Arts
Prof. AlvaradoMDST 3703
27 August 2013
What about you?
• How many CS majors?• How many in Media Studies?• Other College majors?• Non-college majors?
What are the “liberal arts”?
artes liberales
Francese
The Seven Liberal Arts
• Trivium– Grammar– Rhetoric– Logic
• Quadrivium– Arithmetic– Geometry– Music– Astronomy
The liberal arts is a curriculum
How has the curriculum changed?Think of the what we mean by “arts and sciences”
How is it different from the professional schools?(engineering, business, medicine, law)
The humanities are at the centerMany departments fall within history, literature, or philosophy
We often call a student of the humanities a scholarWhat do scholars do?
Scholars interpret and reinterpret texts
(literature, historical records, law, religion)
Scholars also make arguments
essays, books, lectures
All of these forms depend up writing
What happens to scholarship when writing and communication become digital?
What is the digital?
THE DIGITAL
Binary code
Binary code can you be used to represent many things
ASCII stands for “American Standard Code for Information Interchange”
Like words
Colors
and colors
With digital representation, numbers are used like names
What other kinds of things can be represented digitally?
Music
The Shape of Song
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/method/method.html
Madonna, “Like a Prayer”
Bach
Bach’s Goldberg Variations
These examples work the same way
The object is mapped to a set of data and then transformed by algorithms
String operations
• Once things are named by numbers, you can manipulate them …– Parse– Count– Sort– Delete– Repeat– Transform
DNA
What happens to books?
The Bible
Visualizing the Bible
Sentimant analysis
TextArc
http://www.textarc.org/Alice2.
html
Plan of the Course
• Seminar and studio tracks (Tues and Thurs)• Survey of ideas, projects, and technologies• Historical, Critical, and Practical• Focus on core theme of how rhetoric and
reasoning change with the new media– Are linear, verbal arguments side effects of literacy?– Do new media bring there new forms of reasoning?
• See WordPress site and syllabus
Homework!
– Set up your home directories• http://its.virginia.edu/homedir/
– Install JEdit on your computer• http://www.jedit.org/
– Read Kirschenbaum, “Hello Worlds”• To be posted …