If I were looking for a PhD program, I would want it to include a serious component on digital scholarship in the humanities, new media, or something along those lines…..Matt Kirschenbaum lists some of the PhD programs relating to digital humanities but also points out the importance of possibly pursuing a PhD in a traditional field such as English: “Many humanities departments may be nervous about hiring people with new-fangled interdisciplinary degrees. That’s not intended as an absolute red flag, but before you enroll in a brand-new Ph.D. program in a field that didn’t exist ten years ago you should ask for some straight talk about the program’s placement strategy.”
Matt’s post is also a good and brief overview of humanities programs, particularly in English, that are doing innovative things digitally. Those institutions and their faculty are worth observing. There also are some good points listed in the comments to Matt’s post, so be sure to read those, too.
There’s a set of very good tutorials by Jon Udell on the O’Reilly Network under the title Primetime Hypermedia. I’ll be commenting about several of these in more detail later but for anyone involved in new media in higher education, they are worth a look:
Writing and editing will remain the foundation skills they always were, but we’ll increasingly combine them with speech and video. The tools and techniques are new to many of us. But the underlying principles–consistency of tone, clarity of structure, economy of expression, iterative refinement–will be familiar to programmers and writers alike.
Somehow I missed this article - “Is a Cinema Studies degree the new MBA?” - when it first came out in the New York Times last March. (It was about the time that I moved to Buenos Aires, so my mind was rather occupied with visions of tango dancers and art nouveau buildings).
The article mentions how cinema is the professional language of the future. That’s an interesting perspective, which I think is not too far from the truth.
Still more, Ms. Daley, the U.S.C. Cinema-Television dean, argues that to generalize such skills has
become integral to the film school’s mission. More than 60 academic courses at U.S.C. now require
students to create term papers and projects that use video, sound and Internet components - and for
Ms. Daley, it’s not enough. “If I had my way, our multimedia literacy honors program would be required
of every student in the university,” she said.
Supporting multimedia literacy in higher education, however, is a particular challenge. While a film school dean talks favorably about the widespread adoption of having students in various disciplines create video/audio projects, most film schools or communication programs do not see themselves in the position of providing multimedia support to the entire campus. These schools welcome students to enroll in their courses and to use the labs for projects related to cinema courses but students in other disciplines desiring to create audio/video content often have no lab to utilize.
Academic technology centers can play an important role in supporting multimedia literacy. Libraries also can play an essential role. I was successful at establishing digital media labs within the libraries both at Old Dominion and Miami for use by students in many disciplines in the creation of multimedia content. The location of such labs will depend upon local institutional issues but one should never assume that a film program or communications school will shoulder the burden of university-wide support for digital media literacy.
