Course Catalogue

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This course explores the shift from analogue to digital forms of memory, preservation, and mourning. Architectural monuments, stones and flowers left at gravesites, photographs, poems, epitaphs and eulogies have been used for millennia as a way of communicating, remembering, preserving, sharing, and making sense of loss and trauma. We will look specifically to digital communication technologies and platforms and their role in individual and collective memory and ask how memory shaped is and remade when sent via digital means. The course includes a field trip where we will reflect on how cultural institutions (museums, galleries, archives) are adopting digital techniques for preserving or commemorating.

9 x 2hr on-campus seminars

1 x 2hr field trip (asynchonous)

This is one of the MSc options in Communications and may not run every year. The options that are running this session are available on MyCampus.

Standard entry to Masters at College level.

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750 word Social Media Reflection (25%)

750 word Museum/Gallery Field Trip Reflection (25%)

1500 word essay (50%)

This course aims to:

- Explore the shift from analogue to digital forms of remembrance and memorialisation via a wide range of communications practices, such as: digital archiving in museums, Facebook pages for the dead, celebrity holograms, Twitter death hoaxes, graphic renderings of ancient ruins, online obituaries and virtual wakes, and the burnt out apocalyptic cities of video games.

- Question the role of social media communications and how such media engage with memorialisation in ways that are intimate yet public;

- Identify new forms of communication for preserving and transmitting memory such as the phenomena of virtual museums and online archiving, digital memorials, and the memorialisation of cybercities.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

- Practice using a variety of theoretical paradigms to examine phenomena of memory, nostalgia, commemoration, presence, haunting, and rituals of grief and loss.

- Identify the particular and distinct communicative nature of memory that is digitised, reproduced, and

shared among diverse groups and along diversified pathways.

- Compare the major themes, trends, movements, and vocabulary associated with the digital communication of

personal and collective memory, including their tools and effects.

- Use course concepts and reflections to relevant skill development and the practicalities of working in museums, galleries, classrooms, and with the public in general.

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.