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Information Science (INFO)
The Department of Information Science is under construction and will not be offering specific departmental courses until Fall 2016. Students majoring in Information Science will be taking CMCI core requirements in Fall 2015 and Spring 2016.
Information science considers the relationships between people, places and technology, as well as the information or “data” those interactions themselves yield. The Internet is a broad example of a socio-technical system that is comprised of hardware and software but that, in daily life, is better understood as a constantly changing social infrastructure upon which complex forms of human-human and human-information interactions rest.
Information science draws on knowledge from social science, the humanities and computer science to support the study and ongoing innovation of socio-technical systems. Cultural, historical and organizational factors are among the many creative tensions that productively drive the discipline. The disciplinary yield is the creation of new technology, ideas and theory—and a workforce that understands the dynamic processes and potentials that underlie socio-technical interaction.
The department equips students with the conceptual machinery to succeed in a future characterized by new ways of:
- working with ICT and highly distributed and changing information spaces;
- coordinating with people, ICT and the information behaviors to which they together give rise; and
- envisioning occupational, personal and civic goals as enabled by new ICT opportunities and the information they mediate.
The Department advances the research of the discipline and delivers an innovative educational program to its students while aligning with the aims and guidelines of the Information School (I-School) Caucus, a 52-member international association with 26 members located in the United States. As such, the Department of Information Science at CU Boulder is home to grant-driven empirical research that matches the ambitions of the national research goals of the discipline.
Students acquire skills in multiple forms of analysis of information, from small data to big data, from quantitative to qualitative and including information integration, ontology creation and data visualization—because to work with information artifacts, industries and populations means to interact with data inputs and outputs. It means keeping an analytical eye on trends, markets and social behaviors as they manifest themselves in digital traces.
Our students are trained in computing to support their information analytic skills. Such training includes building prototypes and writing scripts to be able to model and implement information artifacts and solutions.
Graduates also acquire skills in human-centered design, participatory design and research design, specifically to be able to craft solutions and evaluate trajectories for those solutions in a real-time relationship with implementation, deployment, use and revision.
Students acquire skills in data curation, archiving and management, because to work with information artifacts, industries and populations requires technical and conceptual capacities to navigate and manipulate heterogeneous information corpora.
The curriculum culminates in projects that put learned skills into place, often in partnership with the Boulder/Denver tech community and/or in relation to disciplines across the entire campus that are expanding their purview as they address new computational opportunities.
Course code for this program is INFO
Bachelor's Degree Program(s)
Bachelor’s Degree in Information Science
The bachelor’s degree aligns with standards set by other universities. It includes liberal arts education combined with empirical work and computing knowledge. The BS also aligns with the grant-driven, collaborative “lab model” research that characterizes the natural and engineering sciences. In addition to course work, the BS has a “domain minor” requirement (or a double major if the student so chooses). The idea is that each student will acquire application domain knowledge in one of the knowledge areas of science, humanities, law, business or engineering—areas that produce a great deal of information that in turn creates new frontiers in those target domains, yielding opportunities in, for example, bioinformatics, crisis informatics, music informatics and digital humanities.
The curriculum culminates in projects that put learned skills into place, often in partnership with the Boulder/Denver tech community. Collaborations occur throughout the College of Media, Communication and Information and with other units on campus, including, but not restricted to, computer science, the Business Cross-Campus Entrepreneurship Program, ATLAS, ICS, the College of Music and the Center for Arts and Humanities.
Required Courses and Semester Credit Hours
The BS in Information Science requires 55 credit hours. Foundation courses comprise 33 credit hours. Students complete major specialization electives (18 credit hours) in sub-areas of information science. A 4-hour capstone project unites the knowledge from students’ domain minor with information science approaches, often in partnership with members of the Boulder/Denver tech community.
Lower-Division Foundation Courses:
- INFO 1000: Information Science Futures
- INFO 2010: Statistics for Information Science
- INFO 2015: Qualitative Methods
- INFO 2020: Programming for Prototyping
Upper-Division Foundation Courses:
- INFO 3005: Human-Centered Design
- INFO 3010: Information Security and Privacy
- INFO 3020: Structures of the Enterprise for Commercial and Social Entrepreneurship
- INFO 3030: Socio-Behavioral Theory and Application
- INFO 4010: Information Visualization
- INFO 4020: Social Computing
- INFO 4030: Data Curation, Archiving and Management
- INFO 4050: Capstone Project Community (4 hours)
Elective Courses:
In addition to foundation courses, the department offers elective courses. These include Medical Informatics, Crisis Informatics, Music Informatics, Digital Humanities, Visual Design, Information Architectures, Advanced Prototyping, Human Computer Interaction Survey, Digital Youth, Mobile Society, Humanitarian Computing and Social Network Analysis.
Graduate Degree Program(s)
The department offers programs of study leading to the MS and PhD in information science. Interested students should contact the department for current admission and degree requirements.