Cử nhân Khoa học xã hội về Truyền thông và Thông tin

At the start of the second year of the programme, you will choose to major in one of two specialisations:

• Cultural Information Studies
• New Media and Digital Cultures

Cultural Information Studies

We live our lives in an information culture. We spend our time informing others, being informed, sending information, being categorised by our information, having our information bought, sold and stolen. Most of us own various devices that are designed to create, access, store and share information. But how does all this work, and what are the consequences of all this information in culture?

Cultural Information Studies is dedicated to the study of media and society through its information fabric and information practices.  It is centred on the application of scientific research methods to the digital, using data-driven research tools and methods. It fully embraces computational tools, not only as objects of study, but as a powerful tool for research and analysis.

The programme consists of three closely connected areas:

• Principled research: You study modern information practices aiming for a fundamental understanding of the underlying principles, capturing key concepts, problems and models that may date back to the analogue age or even to centuries ago.
• Scientific methods: You learn a wide range of empirical research methods, enabling you to measure key aspects of media, information use, its users and the impact on them, as well as to extract meaningful patterns and insights from massive datasets.
• Coding and open data:  You explore coding from a Humanities’ perspective, addressing the principles of programming and providing you with the computational means to manage, process and interrogate data as well as the digital skills to design custom-built research tools or other applications.

New Media and Digital Culture

Digital media are by now ubiquitous and pervasive: mobile media keep us constantly connected, and wherever we go we retrieve, generate, and transmit data, often without being aware of this. The rise of digital media has had profound effects on the way we work, communicate, act, and think. Digital media have also brought new cultural artefacts, as well as new methods for gathering and processing massive amounts of data.

The New Media and Digital Culture track is dedicated to the critical study of the impact of digital media on culture and society.

The programme consists of three closely connected areas:

• Critical digital cultures and media theory: You study media theories and histories and transformations in culture and society brought about by digital media, web and mobile cultures, locative media, ubiquitous computing and digital aesthetics. Some of the topics are new artistic and cultural forms, such as the digital book, smart cities and media genealogies.
• Digital methods: You will explore the possibilities for research into online data cultures and, in particular, the potential of platforms and search engines for cultural, artistic, and empirical research interventions. This component focuses on ‘digitally-born’ objects like hyperlinks, tags, ‘like’ buttons and tweets, as well as on specific digital methods, techniques and strategies such as folksonomies and crowdsourcing.
• Practical: The programme also comprises a strong practical component, because knowledge of and experience with web culture and the ability to study and use web-based applications like blogs, wikis, and software tools are considered as critical skills for academic digital media experts.

The third year