The Digital Social Science programme studies the new digital connections between society, culture, and technology. The unprecedented development of digital technology is transforming social and human sciences, communication, health and social care, community life, and commerce. New digital connections raise economic, social and cultural challenges and opportunities for the next generation of leaders.

The mission of the programme is to develop students’ competencies in creating, compiling, collating, interpreting, presenting, and critiquing digital data across a range of key social scientific and humanities disciplines. By developing such competencies in digital literacy, the programme aims to inspire students to discover and develop their talents for lifelong learning and leadership in the rapidly emerging digital world.

To develop such competencies, the principal aim of the programme is to provide students with an interdisciplinary training in digital literacies as they are applied to core fields of sociology, anthropology, digital humanities, social policy, social welfare, urban development, information sciences, big data and media and cultural studies. Students will have the option of extending from these core disciplinary areas to selected further areas of educational policy, advertising, communication studies, space humanities, cultural management, artificial intelligence, internet of things and smart cities. The programme thus blends a strong technical component with critical skills, professional knowledge and opportunities for research within a broad liberal arts ethos.

In specific terms, the programme offers students:

1) technical, analytical, research and presentational skills necessary to develop and utilise digital applications to social sciences, humanities and cultural data, and to understand the multi-faceted legal and ethical implications of digital technologies;

2) logical and analytical skills required to understand the roles, values and practices that connect digital technologies to social and humanities studies, urban studies, media discourse, behavioural science, and social policy;

3) digital and critical competencies that can be transferred from the key areas of social data analysis, critical media discourse, interpretation of information systems, to broader areas of education policy, social welfare, development, intercultural communications, and advertising. By extending key skills and knowledge in social and cultural data analysis to diverse interdisciplinary fields, the programme aims to develop students as innovative, creative, critical and well-rounded individuals with solid foundation of social sciences;

4) an academic training in the creation, interpretation and presentation of digital social and cultural data that will lead to a range of career opportunities in the public and private sectors, and for entry to top-ranking postgraduate programmes, either in China or overseas;

5) a platform for becoming an active agent in an emerging digital world while developing a critical and ethical understanding of the impact of the accumulation, analysis, interpretation and presentation of digital data on the lives of individuals and communities.