Introduction to the Digital Liberal Arts

Prof. AlvaradoMDST 3703

27 August 2013

What about you?

• How many CS majors?• How many in Media Studies?• Other College majors?• Non-college majors?

What are the “liberal arts”?

artes liberales

Francese

The Seven Liberal Arts

• Trivium– Grammar– Rhetoric– Logic

• Quadrivium– Arithmetic– Geometry– Music– Astronomy

The liberal arts is a curriculum

How has the curriculum changed?Think of the what we mean by “arts and sciences”

How is it different from the professional schools?(engineering, business, medicine, law)

The humanities are at the centerMany departments fall within history, literature, or philosophy

We often call a student of the humanities a scholarWhat do scholars do?

Scholars interpret and reinterpret texts

(literature, historical records, law, religion)

Scholars also make arguments

essays, books, lectures

All of these forms depend up writing

What happens to scholarship when writing and communication become digital?

What is the digital?

THE DIGITAL

Binary code

Binary code can you be used to represent many things

ASCII stands for “American Standard Code for Information Interchange”

Like words

Colors

and colors

With digital representation, numbers are used like names

What other kinds of things can be represented digitally?

Music

The Shape of Song

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/method/method.html

Madonna, “Like a Prayer”

Bach

Bach’s Goldberg Variations

Thoughts

See Tan Li’s demonstrationhttp://goo.gl/YTfxr

These examples work the same way

The object is mapped to a set of data and then transformed by algorithms

String operations

• Once things are named by numbers, you can manipulate them …– Parse– Count– Sort– Delete– Repeat– Transform

DNA

What happens to books?

The Bible

Visualizing the Bible

Sentimant analysis

TextArc

http://www.textarc.org/Alice2.

html

Plan of the Course

• Seminar and studio tracks (Tues and Thurs)• Survey of ideas, projects, and technologies• Historical, Critical, and Practical• Focus on core theme of how rhetoric and

reasoning change with the new media– Are linear, verbal arguments side effects of literacy?– Do new media bring there new forms of reasoning?

• See WordPress site and syllabus

Homework!

– Set up your home directories• http://its.virginia.edu/homedir/

– Install JEdit on your computer• http://www.jedit.org/

– Read Kirschenbaum, “Hello Worlds”• To be posted …