Digital and Computational Studies Blog

Bowdoin College - Brunswick, Maine

Reid Brawer '21

What Blackouts Illuminate, Marcela Guerrero

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Just a week after the second anniversary of Hurricane Maria hitting Puerto, Marcela Guerrero, the assistant curator at the Whitney Museum, presented What Blackouts Illuminate in Kresge Auditorium to a crowd of sixty, including students, faculty and members from the Brunswick community.

What happens when an island loses power for 170 days? Guerrero began her talk with a video addressing the discrepancy of blackouts depending on the relative socioeconomic conditions of the community which is being hit with a blackout. She compared Hurricane Harvey in Texas, where power was restored after eleven days, to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, where after 170 days power was just beginning to return to pre-blackout levels. Without electricity, you can’t refrigerate your food. Without electricity, you can’t use electronic banking. Without electricity, you can’t preserve vital medicines that are temperature sensitive.

Using a variety of art pieces to highlight the detrimental effects of the blackout on the population, Guerrero brought in material crafted by Puerto Rican artists. Some notable artists include: Torres-Ferrer, Allora and Calzadilla. Their work is exhibited in Puerto Rico and throughout the United States, including the Whitney Museum, diversifying the gallery space by displaying art from a traditionally underrepresented population. Guerrero herself is Puerto Rican and is contributing to this paradigm shift in the art world through her profession.

marcella-gurerro-speaking-at-bowdoin
Marcela Guerrero

Guerrero also addressed the dynamic between art and resistance by speaking to the recent shift in the Puerto Rican government as a result of festive protests after leaked documents revealed that corruption contributed to the delayed return of power. During the blackout, Puerto Ricans effectively took governance into their own hands and became their own first response teams. At the same time, President Trump was accusing the Puerto Rican people of “asking for too much,” despite the status of Puerto Rico as a tax-paying territory subject to American aid. Puerto Ricans took to the streets at night with lights, dancing, yoga, motor cycles, and even scuba diving, ousting Governor Ricardo Rossello, who had been in power.

Despite the tragedy Hurricane Maria brought to Puerto Rico, they found unity in the struggle. In their perseverance, their hope became a beacon of light in the darkness.

DCS Coordinate Major and Minor Approved

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Bowdoin faculty voted to approve the promotion of DCS from an initiative to an academic department offering both a Coordinate Major and a Minor. This result is the culmination of ten years of discussions amongst the institution and DCS professors including: Eric Chown, Crystal Hall, Mohammad Irfan, and Fernando Nascimento.

DCS falls perfectly in line with the liberal arts education as it spans across multiple disciplines and employs new computational methodologies in order to prepare students change the world. They will be able to bring skills learned in DCS into their other areas of study, preparing them for deeper levels of discovery. They will be fluent in digital literacy spanning from coding to data analysis to design. Further, students will be able to critically examine the implications of technology in relation to society, and understand the ethical consequences of the technology which they develop in the classroom.

Required Courses for the Coordinate Major:
•At least one of the following:
     o     DCS 1100, Introduction to Digital and Computational Studies
     o     DCS 1200, Data Driven Societies
•At least one of the following:
     o     DCS 2350, Social and Economic Networks
     o     DCS 2500, Digital Text Analysis
     o     DCS 2335, Understanding Place: GIS and Remote Sensing
•DCS 2450, Technology and the Common Good
•A senior capstone course.
     o     This is a year-long culminating course providing an opportunity for a research project that combines the student’s coordinate major with DCS.

Beyond these five courses, students choose a concentration made up of three Digital and Computational Studies (DCS) courses of their choice. The concentration is an opportunity for students to more closely, and more naturally, pair their coursework in DCS with their chosen coordinate major.

Required Courses for the Minor:
• One of DCS 1100 or 1200
• Four other courses in DCS, at least three of which should be at the 2000-level or above

With this approval, Bowdoin will have the opportunity to lead the liberal arts into the future by integrating traditional thinking with the modern world. As DCS continues to evolve, it will respond to emerging challenges at the intersection of technology and society, with the intention to contribute to the Common Good.