Centre for Digital Cultures

• Butchard, D., “Secrecy, Surveillance and Poetic ‘Data bodies’” (2019)
• Butchard, D., “Identification and the ‘Intelligent City’” in The Art of Identification: Forensics, Serveillance, Identity, edited by R. Ferguson, M. M. Littlefield, & J. Purdon (2019)
• Graham, R 2023, Investigating Google’s Search Engine: Ethics, Algorithms, and the Machines Built to Read Us. Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures, 1st edn, Bloomsbury Publishing. 
• Graham, R 2023, 'The ethical dimensions of Google autocomplete', Big Data & Society, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1-5.
• Graham, R, “Google and advertising: digital capitalism in the context of Post-Fordism, the reification of language, and the rise of fake news” (2017)
• Graham, R., “A ‘History of Search Engines: Mapping Technologies of Memory, Learning and Discovery” in Society of the Query Reader: Reflections on Web Search, edited by R. König & M. Rasch (2014)
• Griffin, G., & Hayler, M., “Collaboration in Digital Humanities Research – Persisting Silences” (2018)
• Hayler, M., “Posthumanism and the Bioethics of Moral Responsibility” in Bioethics and the Posthumanities, edited by D. Sands (forthcoming 2022)
• Hayler, M., “Objects, Places, and Entanglements,” “Critical Ambience” (with J. Dovey), and “The Politics of Ambient Literature” (with J. Dovey and T. Abba) in Ambient Literature: Towards a New Poetics of Situated Writing and Reading Practices, edited by J. Dovey, T. Abba, and K. Pullinger (2020)
• Hayler, M., Challenging the Phenomena of Technology: Embodiment, Expertise, and Evolved Knowledge (2015)

Discovering digital cultures (1st year module)

This introductory module enables students to frame informed discussions of the influence of digital technologies on contemporary culture. Students study theorical ideas and cutting-edge digital texts whilst also developing their own digital project, such as building a website, making a short game, or designing an app.

Discovering creative practice (1st year module)

As part of this team-taught module, students will encounter questions around digital authorship, electronic literature, hardware design, and accessibility and diversity in the production of digital texts. What does it mean to write a digital work? How has authorship changed? How might the advantages of the digital be balanced with the rich history of printed works?

Our digital world (2nd year module)

How can we make sense of our digital present? What led us here? And what will the future of digital culture look like across the globe? Our Digital World invites you to think about past, present and future versions of digital cultures in everyday life, print, and on screen. We will explore the role played by authors, theorists, filmmakers, and videogame developers, alongside social media companies, artificial intelligence, and software developers, in co-creating the media landscape we live within.

This module will introduce you to the ways you might read and critique the digital world around you: from interactive storytelling to social media, and consider big global issues, from the impacts of AI to the environmental impact of big tech. We will also address how digital culture impacts people differently around the world. This includes an exploration of the interplay between the digital world and topics such as race, gender, social and economic inequality, disability, and other real-world societal factors.

Interactivity (3rd year module)

This module asks students to get stuck in. Students will explore a variety of media including books, films, non-fiction, theatre, roleplaying, and games and that require their readers and players to shape the meaning of each text through active engagement.

Students will study a range of interactive texts, a variety of theories and contexts with which to understand them, and learn how to make interactive texts yourself across a range of mediums. The kinds of texts studied might include the videogames of Sam Barlow, interactive fiction of Anna Anthropy, playable documentaries such as Out For Delivery, and creative journalism such as Amira Hanafi’s “A dictionary of the revolution.” In addition, students will take part in practical workshops and learn the skills needed to create their own interactive experiences, which will inform their academic understanding of these wide-ranging forms. Students will be taught how to use a range of simple software, such as Twine, an easy to use open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. These sessions will culminate in the creation of a portfolio project for assessment, which will include a piece of interactive content, such as a non-linear short story, an interactive short film, a piece of theatre, videogame, boardgame, playable nonfiction, or other kinds of content related to a particular week of the module.

The end of life as we know it: the implications of digital technology (3rd year module)

This module gives students the opportunity to investigate the contemporary artefacts, effects, and politics of our increasingly digital moment. Each week will focus on a specific technology, such as, mobile phones, digital currencies, virtual reality, or search engines, and explore its current and projected impacts, its context of use, and its place in a history of technological development. This module asks: what role does the humanities play in the development, dissemination, and criticism of these new forces in our lives?

Bringing out the bodies: technology, transhumans, and skin. (3rd year module)

This course explores the relationships between fiction, practical science, politics, philosophy, and ethics and also considers how our view of what it means to be a human being might change through the introduction of new technologies. Students will study how we might play a role in negotiating our future through understanding fiction and the language that people use to discuss new ideas. What is it that excites or scares us about the future? How might arts or humanities research and practice help in the kind of support/prevention that you want to advocate for?

The social life of literature (3rd Year module)

This module explores how we interact with literature today. Far from books existing in a vacuum, they come to us through multiple channels—newspaper reviews, word of mouth, prizes, Instagram pictures, Goodreads—and we read in multiple ways—on our own, in groups, online, offline. In this module we consider the ways in which communities discover, read, and talk about books in the twenty-first century has changed from earlier eras and how these changes affect reading practices.

Living in code: understanding digital cultures (MA optional module)

In this module, students will question the role of digital technologies in shaping lives, literatures, and cultures, exploring how artists and humanities researchers have responded to a wide range of artefacts, artworks, and practices in an increasingly digital world. What new potentials are there for storytelling? Is a printed book the same as a pdf? Do search engines make libraries obsolete? And how might social media affect our identities, self-expression, and the ways communities can communicate? Students do not need any previous experience in studying digital technology; this course will show how existing skills of textual interpretation, critical analysis, and consideration of cultural context can be brought to bear on many aspects of the new digital cultures that we are each connected to or work within.

We currently supervise MA, MRes, and PhD projects on a wide range of topics related to digital technologies, and we would be happy to hear from any prospective research students who think they may want to work in this area.

What’s it like studying at the University of Birmingham?

"I have found the Centre for Digital Cultures to be extremely supportive of my endeavours and research while undertaking a PhD at Birmingham. I have benefitted greatly from the opportunity to both request and hear from guest lecturers as a part of their Arts and Digital Culture speaker series. I have also found the Centre to offer a supportive peer-workshopping environment, receiving feedback from fellow PGRs and lecturers, while also engaging in providing feedback on draft material. The Centre has also provided opportunities and support for developing reading groups and projects adjacent to their objectives and interests, helping myself and fellow PGRs to launch the Contemporary Theoretical Network (Ctrl Network). This project, and the people I have had the fortune to meet while undertaking it, has often impacted the direction of my own research, offering me interesting new leads into theorists and authors who I had not previously encountered." Niall Gallen, PhD Student

“My experience at the Centre for Digital Cultures pushed my research to the very edge of its limits and helped me to develop it into a more coherent nuanced project. Not only did it enhance my work, I also met multiple PGR students through its network that have later become good friends and academic co-authors.
Digital culture is a huge aspect of contemporary life and therefore any contemporary humanities research with regards to the current moment must take the Digital into consideration. A specific focus on technology is integral to the department to keep PGR students in the loop with advances in it that may inform and transform their work. The centre for Digital studies is a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research group that brings together students from multiple areas of research within the university which opened my eyes to the philosophical and real-word implications that my research on literature has at its very core.” Jayde Martin, PhD Student

The Co-Directors of the Centre for Digital Cultures are Dorothy Butchard, Rosie Graham and Rebecca Roach

If you’d like to join the Centre for Digital Cultures, we’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch with the Centre's Co-Directors at digitalcultures@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

• Dr Dorothy Butchard - Lecturer in Contemporary Literature & Digital Cultures
• Dr Rosie Graham - Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and the Digital
• Dr Matt Hayler - Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Digital Cultures
• Dr Rebecca Roach - Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature

If you'd like to find out more about the Centre for Digital Cultures, participate in a future event, or to join our mailing list, we'd love to hear from you. Please get in touch with the Centre's Co-Directors at digitalcultures@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

Postal address:

Centre for Digital Cultures
School of English, Drama and American & Canadian Studies
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
United Kingdom