Digital Media at Hampshire College

Digital Media
Hampshire College was one of the first institutions to offer digital media as an academic concentration, and our program continues to be at the forefront of this emerging field.

Digital media as a field crosses boundaries—it occurs at the intersection of technology and art, and explores how one influences the other. Hampshire’s multifaceted curriculum provides students with strong skills in programming and digital design, and offers access to media labs with industry-standard software.

Courses Hampshire offers include digital photography, digital film and video, electronic music, computer graphics, and animation—all of which explore the potentials and limits of new technology, innovative sources for creative expression, and engaging technology as a powerful catalyst for both intended and inadvertent social transformation.

Student Project Titles

 * WhoseSpace?: Issues of Empowerment and Control in Social Networking Communities
 * Challenging the Digital Generation: An Approach to Creating Critical Consumers Through Media Education
 * Virtual Power, Digital Bodies: Capital and Control in Cyberspace pseudofemme.com: a virtual narrative environment
 * Cyborgs, Posthumans, and New Techniques of Existence in the Age of Technoscience
 * Caught in the Net: Potential Sexual Offenders &amp; the Regulation of Sexual Deviance
 * The Changing Self: Reflections on a Computer Mediated Existence

Featured Faculty Profiles
James Miller Professor of Communications

Chris Perry Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences

John Slepian Five College Assistant Professor of Art and Technology

Sample First-Year Course

 * Media Studies 2.0: Intro to New Media

This introductory course will survey the burgeoning and interdisciplinary scholarship on what has become known as Web 2.0. The course will focus primarily on YouTube, Google, and MySpace, but will use these new media phenomena as an introduction to a variety of social, economic, and political questions about the role of the media in contemporary American life. Topics include: net neutrality, copyright law, privacy, media consolidation and ownership, electoral politics, consumer culture, fan cultures, and, of course, social networking. As a class, we will be creating a podcast series that will be broadcasted on a public version of our course Web site; students will work in pairs to create an episode of the series that further explores their topic of interest.

Sample Courses at Hampshire

 * Art/Nature/Technology
 * Computer Animation I, II &amp; III
 * Computer Music I
 * Digital Art: Multimedia, Malleability &amp; Interactivity
 * Digital Image Manipulation for Film &amp; Video
 * Data Structures
 * Intro to Media Arts in Film, Photo &amp; Video: Cuba
 * Intro to Media Production: Media in Action
 * Math &amp; the Other Arts
 * Media Studies 2.0: An Introduction to New Media
 * Mediawork
 * Minds, Brains &amp; Machines: The 50 Key Ideas
 * New Media: Innovation, Adoption, Future
 * Ordering the World: From Gutenberg to Google
 * Programming Artificial Life
 * Sequential Imagery I &amp; II
 * Topics in Computer Graphics
 * Video II: New Media Convergence
 * What Computers Can’t Do
 * Women in Animation

Through the Consortium

 * Cinema and New Media (AC)
 * Digital Art (MHC)
 * Digital Cultures (AC)
 * Digital Media: Printmaking (UMass)
 * Digital Sound &amp; Music Production (SC)
 * Global Communication (UMass)
 * Interactive Digital Multimedia (SC)
 * Intro Media Arts &amp; Technology (SC)

Facilities and Resources

 * Resources for Computer Musicians

Hampshire also has six flat-bed editing machines, an optical printer, and a professional-quality animation machine. Students have access to large and medium format photography cameras, 16mm film cameras, tripods, light meters, lights, lenses, and virtually any other piece of related equipment they might need. We have a Final Cut Pro editing suite, an Avid digital editing suite, a video studio, control room, and media lab.

The media services office coordinates the booking of all films and videos in the Five College collections, loans of video production and audio/visual equipment, reservations for film preview rooms, and film/video reference help.

The new addition to the Jerome Liebling Center for FIlm, Photography and Video now houses the Advanced Media Workgroup, provides training and skill development in the production of media. The work ranges from video editing, sound design, and interactive DVD to still photography, page layout, presentations, and QuickTime VRs. Additionally, they install and maintain labs, classrooms, and facilities for media presentation and production, providing students with the skills and hardware to make, develop, and present media.

Information Quoted From: http://www.hampshire.edu/admissions/digital_media.htm