This course investigates the transformation of sociology in the age of digital technologies, and offers an advanced introduction to medium-specific social research. The course introduces students to sociological theories relevant to researching digital social life, and examines problems and opportunities that digital technologies open up for empirical social research. The course places special emphasis on the opportunities that digitisation offers for the re-invention of sociology: its overarching aim is to enable examination of, and engagement with, empirical sociology as an ‘inventive’ research practice, oriented towards the creative deployment of research devices and methods. The course combines advanced training in sociological thinking with practice-based forms of methods teaching, taking an explorative approach to renewing the empirical commitments of sociological research in a digital context.

The Digital Sandbox is a core course for both the MA and MSc. Students engage with a lecture series form industry experts and are asked to produce workshops, micro-technical projects, and research portfolios. Sample topics will include: software programming of social media, data visualisation, augmented reality, stop-­motion animation and video editing.

The Digital Sandbox is both a course and a physical location in the CAST computing labs at Goldsmiths. Students will be expected to work in the Sandbox outside of course hours to practice techniques and to work in groups on projects.

The Case Studies lectures set the stage for each week of teaching and encourage student exposure to and interaction with the theory, culture, economics, and emerging technologies of the theory and practices of innovation in management, journalism, sociology, and social media. The case study format encourages active learning and allows the application of theoretical concepts to be demonstrated, thus bridging the gap between theory and practice.

Each week features a different topic so students gain in-­depth knowledge of 10 innovation topics through weekly case study demonstration and critical analysis. Topics ranging from digital media, big data, community curation, engaging audiences, investigative techniques, design, and entrepreneurial activities provide the foundation for practice based research in the programme. Each case study features an industry guest speaker at the executive level discussing challenges related to a real world implementation of the particular case study topic. There will be a one hour lecture followed by an industry guest speaking about a specific case study for 30 minutes. There will be time for questions in the last 30 minutes of the class.

This course introduces students to social research methods that have special salience in the digital context: ethnography, network analysis and online textual analysis and issue mapping. The course offers an advance introduction to computer­‐enabled sociological methods and then proceeds to examine specific methods and their digitisation on a case­‐to­‐case basis. The course provides an overview of the central principles of these sociological methods, and then offers a hands­‐on introduction to correlated online research tools and platforms. The course provides experience of a range of current searching and database technologies, and techniques and commands for the analysis of online social content. Finally, the course explores the sociological implications of the changing status of social research methods in the digital environment, as methods are materialised in search engines, data visualisation tools, and so on.

This course is an introduction to design culture and designerly ways of thinking for sociology students, taught by Nina Wakeford and Alex Taylor (Microsoft Research). In recent years there has been an increasing use of sociological research methods (particularly ethnography and the video interview or observation) in the design world, as designers try to develop products and services that incorporate ‘user-centred’ perspectives. The course will incorporate a ‘live’ design brief, as well as close reading of both texts and design objects. Students will be expected to explore how sociological knowledge can be applied in commercial and non-commercial contexts, such as the development of new consumer devices (eg a new technological product for a particular user group). Particular attention will be paid to the range of translation mechanisms that have been developed to transfer knowledge between researchers and designers, including visual representations, graphic models of human experience, and physical prototypes.

Students will spend 2-­6 weeks working in a content based institution, building on the skills they developed in the first and second term. These will be placements with public sector, industry, NGO and community partners. Many of these projects will provide the foundation for the programme Final Project. Internships will be offered via the CAST Innovation partnership programme as well as the Sociology Department, and arranged via the College.

In the summer term students complete a Major Final Project/Dissertation which engages with a digital research platform, large­‐scale website or social digital application and addresses a specific sociological problem. The final project will have both a practical and a written component. Students will produce a written dissertation which reflects on the sociological problem that the project addresses and the digital methods employed. The practical project may take various forms but must include a technical specification of a digital device, digital method or digital research project. All final projects have two supervisors, one from Computing and one from Sociology, with one supervisor taking the lead during Summer Term. Final projects are flexible in form in that the main emphasis rests on either the practical project or the written dissertation, and this will in part inform the decision to award an MA or an MSc degree. Students will submit proposals for their final project at the beginning of spring term, which are to be approved by the programme convenor and course leader.

The CAST Digital Innovation Bootcamp aims to promote the kind of computer literacy which allows people working in a whole range of fields to harness more fully the power and opportunities networked computing really has to offer. We seek to unlock the potential of your computer hidden beneath its restrictive graphical user interfaces. We introduce the concepts and skills required to deal with the messy realities of data, especially online data, and data representing the residue of social interaction. 

To form a solid grounding in practical computing, we teach UNIX operation and Python programming. These two form a powerful bedrock on which many kinds of data processing task can be implemented. As well as the fundamentals of the Python language, we introduce the rich world of Python libraries which encapsulate solutions to an  enormous variety of problems faced in everyday data processing. 

To complement the data processing power of UNIX and Python, we also introduce interaction design for the Web using HTML5 and JavaScript. Building on this exposition of markup languages and Web concepts, we explore the rich diversity of Web-delivered services for sourcing and processing data and experiment with techniques for scraping unstructured data from the Web. 

The Digital Bootcamp is a practical, hands-on course in which students are given ample opportunity to practice skills and experiment with tools and ideas. Its practicality is backed up by its intensiveness; students on the course are completely immersed in the work for the duration and will emerge comfortable with computing basics and ready to take on your MA/MSc programme. The Digital Bootcamp aims to change the way you think about computing.