Marked by its commitment to openness, collaboration, transdisciplinarity, and experimentation, Digital Culture, Learning, & Advocacy (DCLA) is for students who want their work in digital media and design to make a difference in society. Students in this concentration develop depth of skill in the digital media area of their choice while also gaining practical and theoretical grounding in a humanities discipline or allied field relevant to their post-college interests. From history, anthropology, music, and human development and family studies to human rights, journalism, learning sciences, and more, the varied courses of study available at UConn empower DCLA students to develop a strategic research and career focus. DCLA students envision themselves using their digital media talents in libraries, museums, and the public arena.
Beyond UConn-DMD, those working in digital culture, learning, and advocacy fields are a global community of practice, tied together by social media and humanistic values. Work ranges from democratizing access to cultural heritage, to building tools for scholarly research, to textual and spatial analysis, to experiments in scholarly communication.
Through its teaching and research, the Digital Media & Design Department is advancing the state of the art in digital humanities. Our approach to both teaching and research is interdisciplinary, inclusive, collaborative, and practical. We build things – apps, websites, software, and more – that people use. For students, this means working alongside faculty and other researchers to gain the critical perspectives, skills, and hands-on-experience that making things for real-world use requires. Introductory courses provide a foundation in the history of digital cultures and the evolving nature of digital humanities. Upper-level and graduate seminars foster advanced exploration in Digital Culture, Learning, & Advocacy, covering such areas as open source cultures and cultural heritage. Practicums place students on teams with faculty and staff to contribute to ongoing grant-funded research projects and advance new ones. Current research includes work in digital cultural heritage and public history; museum and library technology; design for game-based learning; academic entrepreneurship and innovation; and scholarly communication.
UConn’s Digital Humanities community of practice extends from its core within the Digital Media & Design Department to encompass collaborations with faculty and colleagues throughout, and beyond, the university. As this network of innovation expands, so do UConn’s contributions to international Digital Humanities.
DCLA majors are mentored in the selection of a focus in the humanities to accent their studies in the BA in Digital Media & Design with a DCLA concentration.
