Hampshire College

Hampshire College was one of the first institutions to offer digital media as an academic concentration, and our offerings continue 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.

Hampshire offers courses in this field that 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.

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.

Facilities and Resources
Hampshire’s campus is wired for wireless Internet and has an e-classroom, several computer labs, and media labs equipped with industry-standard software, facilities for computer animation and video editing, an electronic music recording studio, and a sound lab. Hampshire also has film-editing facilities, an imaging lab, and a photography studio. Hampshire boasts six flat-bed film-editing machines, an optical printer, as well as Final Cut Pro digital editing suites, an Avid digital editing suite, and large-scale printers. In addition, Hampshire’s Studio Arts building houses a third animation studio. A 42 node linux cluster is available as a render, composite or compute farm.