Digital Technology and Culture

A blog for students and friends of Washington State University Vancouver's Digital Technology and Culture Program

Digital Media Primer and the DTC Program

Here is a brief explanation of the various areas of study relating to digital media. Academic departments and programs have been built up around all but Medium Studies, which seems to remain an approach rather than a field. Wikipedia has a definition for most of these and examples of programs from around the world, but here are my own definitions I have created for my own use:

1. Media Studies: Critique and study of media (both analog and digital); theory-based program.

2. Medium Studies: Focus on why and how medium (orality, inscription, print, digital) affects the message; theory-based.

3. Digital Humanities: Production and examination of texts, with a focus on digitalization of analog objects for the purpose of preservation and dissemination; theory and practice.

4. Media Arts/Digital Media/New Media: Production and examination of objects produced by and for computer technologies, such as video, animation, website, digital installation or performance, etc., theory and practice.

Other names and foci exist (i.e. Human Computer Interface, Multimedia Design) but the four mentioned above constitute the major categories under which many programs or scholarship fit.

As you can see, the DTC Program is based on the last of these. From what I learned from since my arrival at WSUV in the fall 2006, creating a Media Arts/Digital Media/New Media Program was the original intent when they envisioned and/or continued to build out the DTC Program. Essentially John and I have made sure that the DTC Program remains current with the field and address the needs of the community. To do so, we needed to add more opportunities in the area of production. Production, however, was already suggested, by the way, in such courses as DTC 355 Multimedia Authoring, DTC 477 Advanced Multimedia Authoring, and DTC 335 Digital Animation and Storytelling.

For the record, digital media are essentially objects produced or distributed by information technologies. There are currently 13 forms/genres of digital media. Ten of these were first identified by Lev Manovitch in his seminal text, The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001), but three others have been added to his list since the publication of his book:

Websites
Virtual Worlds
Virtual Reality
Multimedia
Computer Games
Interactive Installations
Computer Animation
Digital Video
Digital Cinema
Human-Computer Interface
Digital Music/Sound (includes podcasts)
Internet Radio
Digital Photography

Because there are many different types of digital media, John and I have worked very hard to find ways to include them in our courses or to provide courses that address them. This is why the DTC 338 Special Topics course is so vital to the Program. It allows us the ability to teach courses that address cutting edge ideas but also cover these genres without having to offer an individual course for each. The DTC 338 Community Media we are offering this spring is a case in point since it will include both a video and internet radio component. Working with FA also fills in the gaps nicely in that the FA Program offers FA 434 Time Based Media and FA 435 Interactive Media. The former makes it possible to teach digital music; the latter, interactive installations.

Additionally, a theoretical approach to thinking about digital media has emerged over the years, some of which was borrowed from mass media/communications studies. They are:

1. A computer is not a tool or prosthesis that helps us to accomplish something; rather, it is what we do. (Oliver Grau, New Media Art History, 2007 )

2. The medium affects the message. (Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage, 1967)

3. Text is any form of information by which we communicate an idea, feeling, or concept. (Mats Dahlstrom, “When Is a Text Text?,” 2002 )

4. Digital media are material texts. (N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, 2002)

5. Criticism of digital media should be specific to digital media and relies on the sensory modalities of the body for that critique rather than abstract ideas or theories. (N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, 2002)

6. The artifact of new media is just as important as the process it took to produce it. (Jan Van Looy & Jan Baetens, Close Reading New Media, 2003)

7. New media involves an interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary study of art, science, and technology (Edward Shanken, Telematic Embrace, 2003 ) & the Humanities.

To these seven I add this 8th one:

8. Designers of new media "seek to edify more than persuade, to exchange ideas rather than foist them on us" (Robert Jacobson, Information Design, 2000).

I should also mention that the research methodology used by new media scholars is Action Research, which involves Research into/about Design, Research for Design, and Research through Design. According to Stefano Vannotti, it:

“[S]upports” the idea “that practice and research could establish an effective liaison under specific circumstances”

“[P]oints out that as opposed to other research activities the intentional interference of the investigator is central to practical research”

Allows for one to “generate communicable knowledge through practitioner action.” (in Interface Cultures, 55)


Just to put these concepts into perspective, seeing the computer as the thing we do rather than something external to our “real” work” distinguishes digital media scholarship from other Humanities scholarship. Moreover, that we see the end product––the animation, the video, etc.––as important as the process it took to produce it, we are different from those in Rhet/Comp who argue that the process of writing is preeminent over the actual essay that is eventually produced. Finally, although many digital media scholars looking for a theoretical base turned to print based theorists like Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard, etc., a movement has been afoot to develop theories unrelated to print based texts. Hayles’ Media Specific Analysis is one such digital media specific theory to have emerged in the last five years.

In terms of organizations, conferences, and scholarship, when the DTC Program was created in 1997, digital media did not exist as its own field but found expression in conjunction with many other programs like computer science, music, architecture, dance, theatre, visual art, social sciences, and the humanities. The only digital media conference that addressed a full complement of digital media was the Digital Arts and Culture (DAC) conference that came about a year later in 1998. Other conferences existed before DAC, but these generated out of Europe, had a specific purpose, and did not address academic scholarship. The Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, for example, was founded in the Netherlands in 1990 and was aimed primarily at computer-based visual art; SIGGRAPH, founded in 1975, was essentially a computer graphics and interactive art conference for the film industry. Computers and Writing and the 7Cs of the 4Cs arm of the National Council of Teachers of English focused narrowly on the relationship between writing/rhetoric/composition and computers. But it was Manovich’s book as well as publications by Kate Hayles (2002), Roy Ascott (1980s-present), Jay David Bolter (1990, 2000), Janet Murray (1997), and others that built the field as it has come to us today. New media morphed into digital media through a series of rigorous debates among its theorists and practitioners, and 13 genres, instead of Manovich’s 10, were identified as those relating to the field. Many more will no doubt arise in the next decades, so fluid is the field and its forms. Despite this fluidity and hybridity, what can be seen as the establishment of a fully conceptualized articulation of digital media for academic contexts was expressed with the 2004 publication of the International Digital Media and Arts Association’s National Directory of Digital Media Program in the US.

So since the inception of the DTC Program, a whole field has developed and is firmly established at predominately top, cutting edge research institutions like Brown, Duke, MIT, and Carnegie-Mellon. As the iDMAa reported at its annual meeting last week, the field has grown from 500+ programs in 2004 to 800+ in 2008. The DTC Program in Vancouver was one of the pioneering universities in the field––a position we should be very proud of.

As John and I tried to make clear, a robust digital media program is not narrowly defined by a focus solely on criticism but rather seeks to include critical assessment as part of its combination of theory and practice at the intersection of technology, arts, sciences, and the humanities. Taking such an approach means that we will continue to provide the foundational education, the in-depth critical understanding, and the hands on practice needed by WSUV’s students in order to be successful citizens, creators, and users of digital media, technology, and culture.

posted by: grigar at 00:05 | link | comments |

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