IN APRIL 1999 I wrote an opinion article for The
Chronicle in which I called for new, principle-based curricula to prepare
students for the emerging field of interactive design. I criticized the
then-current interdisciplinary programs for inculcating conflicting models
of the computer--models that often reflected the design criteria of older
media--and I recommended a new kind of
professional education that would recognize the computer as a
representational medium with its own expressive properties.
At the time I wrote that essay, I was at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaching one course a year in
interactive narrative, while spending most of my time leading projects in
humanities computing. I became interested in curriculum after the
publication of my book Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in
Cyberspace (Free Press, 1997), which also coincided with the expansion of
the World Wide Web and the growth of the first programs in new
media.
As I spoke with designers in professional and
university settings, I was struck by their shared confusion over how to
evaluate the new digital artifacts they were
making, like online newspapers, multimedia CD-ROM's, and interactive
museum installations. They knew what they liked, but they didn't know
why--and people with different training liked different things. Without
clear conventions to guide them, the designers were forced to rely on
principles that reflected the constraints of the old printed page or film
camera. It seemed to me that a humanities-based professional program could
solve that problem, by looking at the computer as unique in its formal
properties but still embedded in the rich representational traditions of
older media.
In the fall of 1999 I joined such a program. The
School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute
of Technology had been offering a master's of science degree in
information design and technology since 1993. The following fall I became
director of graduate studies, and we began a
process of updating the master's curriculum and designing a Ph.D. program
in digital media,
which admitted its first class last fall. So I have had ample opportunity
over the past few years to experience the challenges of curriculum making
in an emerging field.
Georgia Tech is a good place to think about a
digital-media
curriculum because it is unusual in bringing together, in one academic
unit, a strong faculty of humanists who both make things and theorize
about the media they use. My colleague Jay D.
Bolter, for example, was the co-inventor of Storyspace, an early
hypertext-writing environment, and is currently collaborating on
augmented-reality applications, in which ghostlike video characters are
superimposed on the world around us and interact with us. He is also the
author of several books that examine the relationship between
digital media and
older traditions. Another colleague, Eugene Thacker, writes about the new
understanding of genetics as an information medium and creates art that
merges biological and computational codes.
IN ADDITION, the institution has a longstanding
interdisciplinary culture that fosters collaboration between us and our
colleagues in computer science, digital music,
architecture, and engineering. As a result, we can take breadth for
granted without having to constantly improvise interdisciplinary
connections. Jay Bolter's augmented-reality project, for instance, is
housed in the interdisciplinary Graphics, Visualization, and Usability
Center, and is a collaboration between him and the computer scientist
Blair MacIntyre.
At the same time, we have enough senior and junior
faculty members within our own unit to concentrate on depth. For example,
Michael Mateas creates story games based on artificial-intelligence
programming techniques, Ian Bogost works on political games, and my own
students create conversational characters. Our different
approaches to games and stories expose the
students to a wide range of design strategies.
The Georgia Tech degree programs differ from those
of other universities in some significant ways. Most important, the
master's degree is an academic, rather than a narrowly professional,
degree. Some of our students go on to earn Ph.D.'s, although most go into
professional work. Universities with a strong professional focus often
have a less structured curriculum, relying on team-based projects and
cooperative work with industry to prepare students for real-world jobs.
Our students have summer internships making real-world artifacts like
video games, informational Web sites, interactive TV programs, and
digital-art installations, but the bulk of their
training is in structured courses, including four required core lab
courses and a required "Project Studio" course, which focuses on
long-term, faculty-led research projects.
Like all
digital-media and
new-media graduate programs, ours admits
students from a striking variety of backgrounds: programmers, artists,
journalists, filmmakers. But unlike faculty members at many other
institutions, we expect students to work outside their specialty. We want
the filmmakers and artists to learn the principles of computational
abstraction--how to represent the world as objects with rule-based
behaviors--rather than just mastering the latest multimedia assembly
tools. We want the programmers to integrate knowledge of interface-design
principles with their understanding of the inner workings of a game,
informational Web site, or immersive environment. We also want all our
courses to share common methodologies, like iterative design and focused
critiques. We include theoretical readings in all the core courses,
working from a common reader so that we can coordinate the discussion
across courses and semesters.
A PROGRAM in such a fast-changing field can remain
successful only if the faculty constantly improves and expands the
curriculum in response to emerging technologies (like wireless
communications and interactive television), emerging research fields (like
game studies and the psychology of online
communities), and the increasing sophistication of entering students. One
strategy that helps to keep our master's program in information design and
technology responsive without making it overly trend driven is the
establishment of umbrella courses--like "Experimental
Media" and "Project Studio"--that can be shaped
to reflect the specialties of individual faculty members.
"Project Studio" has been one of the most
successful elements of our curriculum. It is a required, repeatable course
that engages students in team-based, faculty-led projects that produce
deliverables, like a game about urban-planning decisions, within a single
semester. Faculty members are eager to teach the course because it gives
them free assistance with projects--students get credit instead of pay for
their research. It also ensures that all students in the master's program
get a chance to work on well-conceived problems, giving them important
experience with teamwork and in shaping their own projects, as well as
items to include in their professional portfolios.
We have had to balance the responsibility of
preparing our students for professional employment, which requires mastery
of specific tools and practices, with our commitment to a curriculum based
on enduring principles of design--a body of knowledge that the faculty is
constantly redefining as we debate and challenge one another. Because we
came to the theory and practice of digital
media from different disciplinary backgrounds,
we bring many viewpoints on what is essential knowledge in the field and
how it is best taught in the limited time available. Currently we teach
two core courses that emphasize visual culture--from the history of the
alphabet to the creation of three-dimensional moving images--and two that
explore computational structures. Our faculty members continue to be
engaged in reviewing and rethinking the program's learning goals,
especially in the context of evaluating our students' impressive projects
or of reviewing the semester's gloriously varied work at our semiannual
Demo Days.
WITH AN AVERAGE of 15 to 20 master's recipients a
year since 1995 and an expanding international reputation based on the
research activity of our faculty members, the demand for a Ph.D. program
at Georgia Tech grew steadily throughout the 1990s. The effort to start a
program stalled for all the usual reasons that change is difficult at
academic institutions. Faculty members outside the field questioned its
validity while voicing fears that other fields would suffer from the
growing popularity of digital
studies. Faculty members within the field, drawn
from very different disciplinary backgrounds, worried that we would not be
able to reach a consensus about the curriculum. The general shift in
literary and film studies over the last decades
of the 20th century had been from a fixed creative canon to an expanded
and contested creative canon, then to a contested theoretical canon. That
meant that defining a curriculum could easily lead to ideological warfare.
People avoided the task rather than risk dissension.
The initiative gathered momentum only after the
faculty was coaxed into creating a list of possible texts (readings,
artworks, films, digital works, etc.) that
students could present for their comprehensive examination, the multipart
written and oral test that qualified them for submitting a thesis
proposal. Students would be asked to choose 50 works in each of four
categories--media theory,
media traditions,
digital media, and a
specialty category of their own devising; they could be tested on any of
those 200 works. The list began when we combined individual professors'
research bibliographies, which allowed us to see the points of
intersection (for example, everyone included Walter Benjamin's article
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction") and made visible
to everyone many areas of individual expertise that had not previously
been widely known--like research on cognition and culture.
IN ADDITION to our graduates' need for a Ph.D.
program, our master's program had been suffering from the lack of an
undergraduate feeder program. With students coming into the program with
very different kinds of preparation, we felt the need for foundational
courses in graphic design,
digital-media
studies, video production, and other basic
subjects. We therefore welcomed the opportunity to develop a joint
undergraduate major with our colleagues in the College of Computing.
Georgia Tech began to offer a bachelor's of science in computational
media at the same time as our Ph.D. program
started, and that undergraduate curriculum has already allowed us to
rethink our course offerings as a multitiered structure. The new
undergraduate courses have already allowed us to raise the level of our
graduate courses and have also provided valuable instructional positions
for our Ph.D. students.
It may be unusual for a master's program in a new
discipline like
digital-media
studies to lead to Ph.D. and undergraduate
programs. Many institutions start with a few undergraduate courses that
coalesce into a major, and most degree programs begin at the undergraduate
level and work their way upward. But several prominent universities have
started master's programs in the past five years, including Carnegie
Mellon University, MIT, the Rhode Island School of Design, the University
of California at Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California. A
few, like Simon Fraser University and the IT University of Copenhagen,
have established Ph.D. programs. Each of those programs has its own
emphasis, reflecting differences in academic organization and faculty
specialties. For instance, Carnegie Mellon has been particularly
successful in combining improvisational theater techniques with innovative
computing research.
There are also a growing number of programs, mostly
for undergraduates, in game design and digital
media that emphasize industry-oriented training,
and perhaps an equal number in new-media
studies that emphasize theory over practice.
That trend, though understandable, is disturbing because it suggests that
digital media may go
the way of film studies and film production,
literature and writing, or art history and studio art--fragmenting into
two disciplines that barely communicate with one another.
The prospect reminds me of my experience as a
graduate student in English at Harvard University, when I naïvely
suggested taking a poetry-writing course with one of the greatest living
American poets, who was then on the faculty. My adviser looked at me with
horror: "This is not a trade school!" he barked.
It is an odd but persistent academic prejudice to
view analysis and creation as antithetical enterprises. So far my
experience at Georgia Tech has reinforced the opposite belief. I am more
convinced than ever that it is best to teach and learn about
digital media by
combining humanistic critique with
computationally sophisticated practice.
~~~~~~~~
By Janet H.
Murray
Janet H.
Murray is a professor and director of graduate
studies at the School of Literature,
Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of
Technology.