在提供课程之后 数字与计算研究 整整七年, the College faculty recently voted to formalize the trailblazing curriculum into an official academic program, allowing students to add it as a coordinate major—pairing DCS with another discipline, 比如英语或经济学，或者辅修.
来支持这个项目，创建一个命名的椅子, 学院收到了一笔300万美元的匿名捐款. The chair's title will be the Sarah and James Bowdoin Chair in Digital and Computational Studies and will be held by Professor 埃里克·乔恩. 这个项目的教员将搬到 巴里·米尔斯大厅 预计将于2020年1月开放.
The opportunities that a full-fledged Digital and Computational Studies program could offer students were highlighted in the 2018 initiative launched by President Clayton Rose to identify the knowledge, 技能, and creative disposition every Bowdoin student should possess in a decade's time. “KSCD报告 put an exclamation point on our need to keep moving forward with DCS and to take it to the next level,教务处主任利兹·麦科马克说. “It offers a whole new set of pathways for students from multiple disciplines to be exposed to algorithmic problem-solving, 编码, and the implications of new digital artifacts and technologies.”
DCS is separate from computer science, though related in the technology it uses. While computer science is intent on creating—ever more efficiently—artifacts (like software and hardware, 人工智能, 社交媒体, 等.), DCS analyzes those artifacts and their place in the world. 另外, DCS uses technology to mine data and answer questions in other areas, 从文学、生态到政治、艺术.
“技术的使用仍然存在, but the idea of technology and computational and digital artifacts as things to be studied—in the way we study texts—has crystalized a lot of our thinking,Chown说。. “我们在文科一直都是这么做的."
Students in the new DCS minor or coordinate major will analyze and critique the way technologies are impacting our personal and social environments, and how they affect people's capacity to act in the world. 因为这些技术总是在变化, the DCS faculty has forged "an analytical framework capacious enough to address change and be nimble in the face of change,“数字人文学科副教授 水晶厅 说.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital and Computational Studies 费尔南多Nascimento 说 DCS is less about the how of information technology, and more about the why. “While other technical disciplines focus on how we create new technologies, DCS expands this question to include the meanings of such innovations: Why should we create these new technologies? And what are the possible implications of such innovations to the common good?他补充道.
Since Bowdoin offered its first class in 数字与计算研究 in 2013, faculty have wrestled with questions around how to define the rapidly evolving field, what technical and intellectual 技能 should be taught to students, and how to fit the study into the context of a liberal arts college.
就在过去的几年里, the DCS faculty members have begun emphasizing what they see as a foundational component of the program. "A central part of what we're trying to do in DCS is ground it in some kind of ethical framework,Chown说。.
The thoughtful and rigorous study of our digital world is growing increasingly important, 霍尔和乔恩都在争论. "It feels pressing and urgent in a way it didn't before," Hall 说. Chown called the new academic program "exciting and necessary."
Students these days regularly bring in news articles about topics discussed in class, 从人工智能到面部识别. "They're able to see the value of DCS outside of the classroom," Hall 说.
DCS课程样本
- 数据驱动的社会
- 科技造福大众
- 模拟和数字环境下的认知
- 如何读一百万本书
- 数字文本分析
- 数据编程
- 社会和经济网络
- 电影制作和数字化叙事
- 交互性、计算和媒体架构
- 理解地点:地理信息系统和遥感
- 建设有复原力的社区
- 认知体系结构
- 高级顶点项目(两学期)
"We're at an important and dangerous moment in our world right now, where a lot of technologies are emerging that have increasingly large capacities to affect our lives," 他说.
“这很重要, 作为一个社会, we can critically evaluate these tools so we can decide whether it's good or bad that they're being used. Part of DCS is giving students the facility to do those evaluations—some of that will be ethical, 一些技术."
