This document provides an introduction to a course on the digital liberal arts. It discusses the history of the liberal arts as stemming from the medieval trivium and quadrivium. It notes how the liberal arts curriculum has changed over time. The document asks students about their majors and explores how the digital represents information through binary code. It gives examples of how different media like music, art, and text can be represented digitally. The course will examine how reasoning and rhetoric change with new digital media and technologies. Students are assigned homework to set up course accounts and install software in preparation for the seminar.

1. Introduction to
the Digital Liberal Arts
Prof. Alvarado
MDST 3703
27 August 2013

3. What about you?
• How many CS majors?
• How many in Media Studies?
• Other College majors?
• Non-college majors?

4. What are the “liberal arts”?

5. artes liberales

6. Francese

7. The Seven Liberal Arts
• Trivium
– Grammar
– Rhetoric
– Logic
• Quadrivium
– Arithmetic
– Geometry
– Music
– Astronomy

8. The liberal arts is a curriculum

9. How has the curriculum changed?
Think of the what we mean by “arts
and sciences”

11. How is it different from the
professional schools?
(engineering, business, medicine, law)

12. The humanities are at the center
Many departments fall within history,
literature, or philosophy

13. We often call a student of the
humanities a scholar
What do scholars do?

14. Scholars interpret
and reinterpret texts
(literature, historical records, law,
religion)

15. Scholars also make arguments

16. essays, books, lectures

17. All of these forms depend up writing

18. What happens to scholarship when
writing and communication become
digital?

19. What is the digital?

20. THE DIGITAL

21. Binary code

22. Binary code can you be used to
represent many things

23. ASCII stands for
“American
Standard Code for
Information
Interchange”
Like words

24. Colors
and colors

25. With digital representation, numbers
are used like names

26. What other kinds of things can be
represented digitally?

27. Music

28. The Shape of Song
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/method/method.html

29. Madonna, “Like a Prayer”

30. Bach
Bach’s Goldberg Variations

31. Thoughts
See Tan Li’s demonstration
http://goo.gl/YTfxr

32. These examples work the same
way
The object is mapped to a set of data
and then transformed by algorithms

33. String operations
• Once things are named by numbers, you can
manipulate them …
– Parse
– Count
– Sort
– Delete
– Repeat
– Transform

34. DNA

35. What happens to books?

36. The Bible
Visualizing the Bible

37. Sentimant analysis

38. TextArc
http://www.textarc.org/Alice
2.html

39. Plan of the Course
• Seminar and studio tracks (Tues and Thurs)
• Survey of ideas, projects, and technologies
• Historical, Critical, and Practical
• Focus on core theme of how rhetoric and
reasoning change with the new media
– Are linear, verbal arguments side effects of literacy?
– Do new media bring there new forms of reasoning?
• See WordPress site and syllabus

40. Homework!
– Set up your home directories
• http://its.virginia.edu/homedir/
– Install JEdit on your computer
• http://www.jedit.org/
– Read Kirschenbaum, “Hello Worlds”
• To be posted …