Graduate Certificate

The graduate certificate program in Digital Media and Culture explores the shifting nature of scholarly expression, pedagogical practice and research in the 21st century, combining seminars with hands-on, lab-based workshops in order to facilitate sophisticated critical thinking and practice in and through multimedia.

The program provides participants with a sophisticated conceptual framework for considering the emerging landscape of scholarship in the digital age, as well as a broad overview of contemporary scholarly multimedia as it intersects with media art, information design, interactive media and communication studies.

The certificate is open to graduate students interested in emerging modes of creative, networked and media-rich scholarship, with no previous media production experience assumed. Students earn the certificate in Digital Media and Culture by completing a minimum of 12 units of required coursework.

View Degree Requirements in the USC Catalogue
Application Instructions

“The Digital Media and Culture Graduate Certificate helped me ground my research with an eye towards different kinds of expressions beyond just the textual. Many of the techniques and forms that I encountered during the certificate have become staples of my own teaching today! The focus on making a “digital argument” in these classes made me turn to other forms such as GIFs which I have become interested in both as a form of media that I research, as well as a form of thinking through making. Specifically, I became familiar with Scalar and the video essay form in IML 501: Digital Media Authorship and the Archive and IML 502: Techniques of Information Visualization, while the Digital Pedagogies class helped me think critically about my own teaching practices and the institutions and norms of academia as a whole.”

— Anirban K. Baishya
Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Politics and Culture
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Skills

Media Platforms and Critical Making

Interactivity and nonlinear argument
Image optimization and asset management
Algorithmic research methods
Information Visualization

Pedagogical and Professional Approaches

Critical literacy and teaching philosophy
Statement of commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion
Statement of research methods
Syllabus design and development
Rubrics and assignment design

Emergent Genres and Critical Themes

Media Activism
Project Documentation
Remix Culture
Design Fiction
Worldbuilding
Human-Computer Interaction

Student Projects

Biorhythm:Algorithm:Breath

Video remix meditation on the convergences of breath in song, protest, commodity and life.

Hacking the Classroom: Remixing Spaces and Texts

Viola Lasmana explores multimodal composition as a transformative scholarly practice, and offer examples from various projects that incorporate and also go beyond traditional scholarship.

Remix: A Litany for Survival

Borrowing from the work of Audre Lorde, this piece uses a black queer feminist lens to analyze performance as a means of survival and a tool always already expected and enforced through Black women’s bodies within the entertainment industry.