Graduate Course Pathway

Foundations of Information

Irene Lopatovska  |  FA 21

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The intersection of people, information, and technology and the theoretical and conceptual foundations of the information field is introduced by informing future specializations and providing concrete strategies for ongoing professional growth and development in specific professional interests.

Information Technologies

Nicholas E. Dease  |  FA 21

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Introduces the fundamental concepts of computing and networking, with an emphasis on the role these technologies play in creating, manipulating, storing, and accessing information. Topics essential to the work done by information professionals will be highlighted: web technologies, database concepts, markup languages, data management, and design and accessibility. Students will conduct frequent hands-on activities to acquire skills that are immediately applicable to working with information technologies. The course will explore recent trends in technology within information organizations, preparing students for their roles as information professionals and providing the foundation for future technology-related coursework.

Museums & Digital Culture

Sara DeYoung  |  FA 21

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This required course introduces students to the theory and practice of museums and digital culture and to current research in the field. Students learn how digital culture is transforming museums across the full range of museum functions and activities and become familiar with the digital tools and technologies that engage and inform museum visitors. The course gives a broad overview of field's development, which importantly is grounded in information science and the related fields of museum informatics and digital cultural heritage, fields that find commonalties of practice with libraries and archives. The course examines the issues and challenges museums face today and moving into the future. It surveys digital culture across the museum from the perspectives of digital technology and social contexts including digital information behavior, user experience, digital exhibitions and museums on the Web. Students experience and engage with museum digital culture through lectures, engaging with museum professionals, field observation, and by doing a final digital project drawn from coursework and class presentation.

Museum Digital Strategy

Elena Villaespesa  | SP 22

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Museums are developing and implementing digital strategies to embed the use of technology across their different functions with the end goal of engaging with their audiences in the digital arena. This course aims to provide an understanding of the management and planning concepts, frameworks and tools needed in the implementation of a digital strategy. Students engage in hands-on exercises to learn how to define, execute and evaluate a digital strategy. This course examines how to integrate digital platforms such as website, mobile technologies and social media into the strategic plan and tactics of the museum with the aim of reaching audiences, increasing engagement with the online communities and improving the visitor experience. It includes a review of some of the digital strategy documents published by various museums and an online analysis of their digital outcomes. From an internal organizational perspective, the course explores how specific museums have incorporated digital plans to transform their culture, processes and increase their digital literacy. Discussions during the course will deepen into the opportunities and challenges of implementing digital practices in a museum.

Museum Information Management

Iris Lee &  Jennifer R. Cwiok  |  SP 22

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In this course, students will learn to manage a museum's most important information source: its collection information. Students will learn the functions of collection management systems, how to catalog cultural objects by applying descriptive metadata standards and best practices, and explore the potential for creating new access points to museum collections through digital tools. 

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Keywords: 

• Protocols of collection management system(CMS)

• DAM

• Catalog practices & standards, control vocabularies

• Dublin Core, CCO, Getty Vocabularies

• Evaluate strategies for creating new access points to museum collections through digital tools

Digital Analytics

Elena Villaespesa  |  SP 22

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Cultural institutions embrace digital media and use it as a means to communicate and promote their activities, and also to interact and engage with their audiences. Digital Analytics can help to understand the users and their behaviors on the organization's website, social media and mobile apps. This course is intended to provide an insight on the digital analytics process and present the steps to define and select metrics that support organizational strategic goals and measure digital success. This course teaches how to use some of the most significant digital analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Insight or Twitter Analytics. Students will develop skills in the use of these tools, including advances settings, user segmentation, content testing, report automation and dashboard creation. The course covers the entire process, from how to collect data from different platforms to analyze and visualize the date. There is an important practical component where students conduct exercises on how to extract and interpret data to make changes to a website, app or social media activity. Examples are presented to illustrate how to use the different analytics reports in order to provide insights, inform strategy and provide evidence to help the decision making process.

Creating Exhibitions

Lisa A. Banner  |  FA 22

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This course offers an introduction to the process of planning, curating, execution, publicizing, and finding of art or design exhibitions. This course prepares the student for participation in small or large presentations of commercial or educational exhibitions within an organization or school, or in galleries, museums, or large commercial expositions and fairs.

Emotional Design

Pamela Pavliscak  |  FA 22

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This course covers the fundamental concepts, methods, and practices of emotional design and the emerging field of emotion technology, or affective computing. Students will learn how to conduct research on the emotional experience of interactive products using a variety of techniques. Student will gain skills in designing for emotion with a combination of emerging industry best practices, analogous thinking, and ethical guidelines. Through hands-on exercises and assignments, students will apply an iterative, user-centered design process to create a range of emotionally intelligent products, from apps to chatbots to connected home devices.

Projects in Digital Archives

Anthony P. Cocciolo  |  FA 22

This course introduces students to all aspects around the move of archives into the digital world. Topics covered include digitizing materials (such as moving image and sound collections and visual media like photography), managing born-digital collections, digital preservation, archival metadata and standards, legal issues, archival interfaces, web archiving, diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) and environmental sustainability. This course proves an opportunity for students to learn how to create a digital archive, and practice the implementation of such a digital archive with an archival collection.

Audience Research / Evaluation

Sara DeYoung & Jamie L. Lawyer  |  SP 23

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Through hands-on experience, this course introduces students to the theory and practice of audience evaluation in a museum setting. Students will gain first-hand knowledge by executing an evaluation for a New York City institution. After two introductory sessions spent learning basic theory and practice, students will meet with museum staff to determine the research question and will then plan and execute the evaluation. Students learn how to build a research question, what to run the evaluation, how to mine the data for insights, how to write a compelling and useful report, and how to present findings to stakeholders. The final project is the evaluation report and presentation given to museum stakeholders. Through this course, students are able to immediately put theory to practice and will execute a portfolio-worthy final project. Although we are experiencing an era of "big data," it remains challenging for museums to understand their visitors. Despite the mountains of data available about people, museums often rely on seemingly dated audience evaluation techniques; and for good reason: "big data" doesn't provide a complete picture of visitor behavior. This course examines the limitation of different research methodologies, data points, and evaluation approaches, and provides a critical understanding of the usefulness of audience evaluation as it relates to the museum field.

Information Visualization

James L. Adams  |  SP 23

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This course examines the art, science and practice of information visualization. Particular emphasis is placed on the ways in which position, shape, size, brightness, color, orientation, texture, and motion influence perception of information and facilitate comprehension and analysis of large and complex bodies of information. Topics include cognition and visual perception; the aesthetics of visual media; techniques for processing and manipulating information for the purpose of visualization; studies of spatial, relational, multivariate, time-series, interactive, and other visual approaches; and methods for evaluating information visualizations.

Color Studies

Michelle M. Hinebrook  |  SP 23

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This course explores color and light phenomenology in the three-dimensional world. Relationships between color and light as they affect our visual perception of size, shape and proportion are explored from both practical and aesthetic perspectives. Projects examine color and light on forms such as product and packaging as well as color and light in space, as for display and interiors.