University began offering a related master's program in that year, and at the University of Maryland, David Silver created the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies on the web. Middlebury College developed Politics of Virtual Realities, one of the first undergraduate courses dedicated to exploring the political, legal and normative implications of the Internet for liberal democracy. By 2001, The Chronicle of Higher Education noted that "Internet studies" was emerging as a discipline in its own right, as suggested by the first undergraduate program in the area, offered at Brandeis University, and noted that "perhaps the most telling sign of the field's momentum" was the popularity of the annual conference created by the then nascent Association of Internet Researchers. Scholarly organizations American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) American Sociological Association, Section on Communication and Information Technologies (CITASA) Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Communication & Technology Division (CTEC) Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Internet & Politics Standing Group (SG) International Communication Association Communication & Technology (CAT) division National Communication Association (NCA) Human Communication and Technology Division (HCTD) Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) See also Digital history Digital humanities Internet research ethics Library science Web science References Sources Further reading Internet culture studies Interdisciplinary subfields Sociology of the internet