Explore our Digital Media and Culture taught Master's degree.

P-L99A

MA

1 year full-time;
2 years part-time

2 October 2023

Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies

University of Warwick

Digital Media and Culture MA focuses on how digital processes are transforming culture, the economy and society. Become trained in the tools to understand it, and use digital media creatively and critically at Warwick's Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies.

Digital media today affect all aspects of everyday, professional and public life, and understanding its significance requires interdisciplinary knowledge. Based at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) at the University of Warwick, the MA Programme in Digital Media and Culture is an advanced one-year postgraduate degree that addresses the role of digital technologies, media, and infrastructures in relation to culture, economics, politics, and society.

Drawing on multiple disciplines, the degree supports critical approaches to key topics in digital culture, including:

• Platformisation
• Participatory culture
• Media activism
• Digital labour and political economy
• Privacy and surveillance
• Behavioural design
• Data critique
• Environmental sustainability

Our teaching combines theory, research methods, and creative practice. By selecting from a diverse offering of modules, students will have, for instance, the opportunity to learn data analytics and visualisation, to engage with speculative design and media art, and to discuss concepts in fields ranging from software studies to environmental humanities.

Based at a research centre promoting cutting-edge scholarship in these areas, our degree is primarily research-driven. MA students will be encouraged to select their own path through the degree and contribute to the culture of CIM by attending invited talks, participating in workshops, and organising interdisciplinary symposiums.

Modules in this course make use of a range of teaching and learning techniques, including, for example:

• Online Virtual Learning Environment
• Student Group and Project Work
• Lectures
• Seminars
• Reading and Directed Critical Discussion
• Independent Research by Students
• Practice-Based Activities

A typical seminar size for this course contains around 16 students.

There are around 7-9 hours contact hours per week, depending on optional modules chosen.

A combination of essays, reports, design projects, technical report writing, practice assessments, group work and presentations and an individual research project (10,000 word dissertation).

Reading lists

Most departments have reading lists available through Warwick Library. If you would like to view reading lists for the current cohort of students you can visit our Warwick Library web pageLink opens in a new window.

Your timetable

Your personalised timetable will be complete when you are registered for all modules, compulsory and optional, and you have been allocated to your lectures, seminars and other small group classes. Your compulsory modules will be registered for you and you will be able to choose your optional modules shortly before joining us.

2:i undergraduate degree (or equivalent).

• Band B
• IELTS overall score of 7.0, minimum component scores of two at 6.0/6.5 and the rest at 7.0 or above.

There are no additional entry requirements for this course.

Approaches to the Digital

Computer networks, devices and infrastructure today undergird nearly all form of societal, political and cultural life. Police and hospitals, schools and transport, traffic lights and government bodies, elections, museums and artists rely on software systems for their everyday performance.

Whether used for tracking, organising, evaluating, creating, designing or communicating, digital technology and its use irreversibly transforms the fabric of everyday life, defining the horizon of the future. Given the widespread implications of such ‘digitalization,’ this module offers an introduction to how different disciplines beyond computer science have approached the digital methodologically and epistemologically.

Digital Objects, Digital Methods

Emerging digital research methods also become means through which such objects are sustained, thus co-creating dynamic objects, such as networks, databases, platforms, data visualizations, maps and many other new forms of social, cultural and public life.

This module offers an insight into these new and emerging societal and cultural entities and methodologies. We will take a number of digital objects relevant to the social sciences and humanities and analyse them using digital methods, including network analysis, software studies, content analysis, issue mapping, and others. Digital media research sits alongside social studies of computational technologies and cultural theory as the fields that emerging digital methods take inspiration from.

The module is open to students from all disciplines; no specific prior knowledge is required.

Dissertation

The CIM Master's dissertation is a piece of work (10,000 words) which addresses a single student-selected subject. The topic may concern any aspect of the subject matter of their Master's programme.

The dissertation is an exercise in independent study in which you can pursue a topic of interest. It allows you to further develop a range of independent research skills, including literature search and bibliography construction, theoretical argument, and generation/appraisal of empirical evidence.

• Media Activism
• Data Visualisation in Science, Culture and Public Policy
• User Interface Cultures: Design, Method and Critique
• Visualisation Foundations
• Digital Sociology
• Platform, Economy and Society
• Ecological Futures: Science, Culture and Media
• Data Science Across Disciplines: Principles, Practice and Critique

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