What is Digital Arts and Culture?
DAC is an interdisciplinary program, offering both a Bachelor of Arts and a Certificate. But it’s also a networked community of students, artists, scholars, and practitioners. Coursework is drawn from three schools and colleges at UWM: Peck School of the Arts, College of Letters and Science, and School of Information Studies, with an overarching interest in the study and practice of Arts, Information, and Media.
DAC is interdisciplinary, flexible, and adaptable, allowing you to enthusiastically go after your fascination for media and culture by exploring diverse ideas and connecting to new networks of people.
DAC combines critical thinking skills from the liberal arts tradition with combinations of applied or technical skills. Students may pursue courses in the areas of Art & Design, Journalism, English, Communication, or Information Science, just to name a few. These also include technical writing, digital composition, and audio-visual production; graphic, communication, web, and interface design; and the organization and analysis of information and how it’s being used on the web, mobile, and social media.
What will I learn and do in a DAC program?
- Analyze digital and electronic media systems, explaining what these platforms do and how they do it.
- Engage with complex digital issues: online, offline, via ubiquitous computing hardware and software.
- Organize information, both architecturally and visually, structuring software, websites, advertisements, social media, and more.
- Demonstrate hands-on, collaborative, and cross-disciplinary, media production with artists and designers.
What can I do with a DAC major or certificate?
A recent report by the UW System and UW-Milwaukee about preparing students for the workplace says that one-in-three jobs of the future don’t exist yet. This is due to the rapidly changing nature of the fields involving technology and society. The jobs we know today will be unrecognizable, even in a few years.
What else can I do with a DAC major or certificate?
As the gig economy grows, ManpowerGroup predicts more people will become “independent professionals accepting their own clients, selecting their own schedules and moving at their own paces.”
Any position, whether it’s for a small nonprofit or large corporate entity, a large institution, or working as an independent media producer will require the ability to navigate and learn new technical skills. The ability to recognize that adaptation is a necessity for the society of the future. DAC equips students with an advantage to understand the social, political, and economic systems that are at work reorganizing how we work, play, and live.
A majority of our alumni go on to work as Artists or Designers, Advertising or Public Relations Creatives, Administrators for organizations, Social Media Coordinators, and Digital Marketing or Media Technology Specialists.
What do DAC students and alumni say?
See and hear from some recent DAC graduates about how they have benefitted from Digital Arts and Culture and how they are planning on applying their expertise after graduation. https://uwm.edu/digital-arts-culture/people/dac-alumni
For more information email dac-info@uwm.edu.