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DCS Coordinate Major and Minor Approved

October 7, 2019 By Reid Brawer '21

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.

Filed Under: Digital and Computational Studies Initiative

Digital and Computational Studies Blog

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