Syllabus

ITP Core 1:  History, Theory, and Practice of Interactive Media
Professors Stephen Brier and Michael Mandiberg

ITCP 70010: Fall 2017
Seminar: Mondays, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
Seminar meets in room 3309
Lab: Mondays, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Lab meets in GC Library Basement, room C196.01

Commons group and blog:
https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/itp-core-1-fall-2017/
https://itpcore1fall2017.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

Stephen Brier (sbrier@gc.cuny.edu)
Office: 7301.10
Office Hours: By appointment (contact Julie Fuller at x7289 or jfuller1@gradcenter.cuny.edu). Usually available in my office the hour prior to class.

Michael Mandiberg (mmandiberg@gc.cuny.edu)
Office: 3204.09
Office Hours: By appointment (contact Julie Fuller at x7289 or jfuller1@gradcenter.cuny.edu). Usually available in my office the hour prior to class, and Wednesday afternoon.

Books to Purchase:

All books are available in paperback and most for e-readers (Kindle, iPad, etc.).  If you do use Amazon, you are encouraged to purchase books via the tiny icon link to Amazon on the bottom right corner of the GC Mina Rees Library webpage (http://library.gc.cuny.edu/), which yields a 5 percent contribution from Amazon to the GC library for book and electronic resource purchases.

  • Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, Yale Univ. Press, 2006.
  • Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Any edition/version; there are PDFs online.
  • Michael Fabricant & Stephen Brier, Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Education, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2016).
  • Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the Future of the Academy, NYU Press, 2011.
  • Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, orig. pub. 1970 (any edition). [Available as a pdf on course Group site]
  • James Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy?, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
  • Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, Verso, 2007.

Books available by purchase or freely available online:

  • Matthew Gold, ed., Debates in the Digital Humanities, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2012. (available in an e-version at http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/)
  • Matthew Gold and Lauren Klein, eds., Debates in the Digital Humanities, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2016. (available in an e-version at http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/)
  • Michael Mandiberg, ed., The Social Media Reader, NYU Press, 2012. (available on archive.org)

Optional Supplementary Texts/Films  (to be used for the first paper only):

  • Alex Rivera. Sleep Dealer (2008 film).  Available for purchase or download on iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play.
  • Cory Doctorow, Little Brother. Available in a variety of formats under a Creative Commons license from Gutenberg.org — http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30142

Fall 2017 ITP Core 1 Preliminary Syllabus (**This will probably change!**)

Prologue: Dystopias/Utopias: Technology and Science Fiction

August 28:  Dystopian Visions of Technology

Screen Ridley Scott’s film, Blade Runner (1982) [Please view the 25th Anniversary “Final Cut” DVD version of the film (2007), which you can buy on Amazon or view on Netflix]

Phillip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) [Available as a pdf on course Group site]

  • Optional Supplementary Text: Alex Rivera’s film, Sleep Dealer (2008)

Monday, September 4: No Class, Labor Day

Unit One: Historical Perspectives on Technology

September 11:  Historical Materialist Theories of Technological Change and Transformation

Karl Marx, Capital (1867) [Vol. 1, Chapter 15, “Machinery and Modern Industry,” Sections 1-6, 8-10].  Available online:  http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ or any print editions (there are many)

E.P. Thompson, “Time Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” in Past and Present 38 (1967), 56-97. Available online at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/649749.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (1977), Chs. 1 – 4  [Available as a pdf on course Group site]

Walter Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) [available at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm]

Supplementary/Essential Viewing: David Harvey’s two-part online lecture on Ch. 15 in Marx’s Capital, “Machinery and Large Scale Industry” at: http://davidharvey.org/2008/08/marxs-capital-class-08/ and http://davidharvey.org/2008/08/marxs-capital-class-09/.

September 18: The History of the Internet

Guest: Jojo Karlin, Digital Fellow

Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think.” The Atlantic Monthly (July 1945).  Available online: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush

Roy Rosenzweig, “Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet” American Historical Review (December 1998) Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2649970

Tim Berners-Lee, “Information Management: A Proposal.” CERN (1989).  Available online:  http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

Steve Jones, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, (Routledge, 2013). “Introduction,” pp. 1-17. [Available as a pdf on course Group site]

Optional Supplementary Text: Cory Doctorow, Little Brother, Ch. 1-12 (read it all, if you can).

September 25:  Bodies in Cyberspace

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto:  Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991, 149-81. [Available as a .pdf on course Group site.]

Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (1999), Prologue and Chapter 1 [Available as a .pdf on course Group site.]

Lisa Nakamura, “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet” in Works and Days, Volume 13, Nos. 1 & 2, 181-193, 1995. [Available as a .pdf on course Group site.]

Nicholas Gane, “When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done?: Interview with Donna Haraway,” Theory, Culture & Society (December 2006), 135-58. [Available as a .pdf on course Group site]

Suggested Reading:

Allucquere Rosanne Stone, “Will the real body please stand up?: boundary stories about virtual cultures,” in Cyberspace, Michael Benedikt (Ed.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1991, 81-118. Available online: http://sodacity.net/system/files/Sandy_Stone_Will_the_Real_Body_Please_Stand_Up.pdf

Katherine Hayles, “Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere.” Theory, Culture & Society 23.7-8 (2006), 159-66. [Available as a .pdf on course Group site]

Unit Two: Teaching, Learning, and the University

October 2:  The Uses, Present and Future, of the University

Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 2001 edition. Ch . 1, 3. [Available as a .pdf on course Group site]

Introduction and Chapters 2 & 3 in Part I: The Political-Economic Context of Public Higher Education, in Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier, Austerity Blues: The Crisis in Public Higher Education.

The Rise (and Fall) of MOOCs – NY Times editorial (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapid-pace.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1); Thomas Friedman Op-Ed (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/opinion/sunday/friedman-revolution-hits-the-universities.html); and David Brooks Op-Ed (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/opinion/Brooks-The-Practical-University.html).

Clayton Christensen, The Innovative University, 2011. Ch. 1, 13-14, 20, 23 [Available as a .pdf on course Group site]

Jill Lepore, “The Disruption Machine,” in The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine)

William Deresiewicz, “The Neoliberal Arts,” Harpers, September 2015, 25-32. [Available as a .pdf on course Group site]

Chapters 6, “Technology as a ‘Magic Bullet’ in an Era of Austerity” in Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier, Austerity Blues: The Crisis in Public Higher Education.

October 9:  No Class (CUNY is closed for Columbus Day holiday)

October 16: Teaching and Pedagogy: Experiential Learning

John Dewey, Experience and Education (1938), Chapters 1, 5-8 [Available as a .pdf on course Group site]

Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapters 3 and 4

Randy Bass, “Engines of Inquiry: Teaching, Technology, and Learner-Centered Approaches to Culture and History.”  [Available as a .pdf on the course Group site]

The Visible Knowledge Project” Available at: https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/vkp/library/  [Browse various VKP projects]

Sam Weinberg, “Why Historical Thinking Matters” Flash slide show at: http://historicalthinkingmatters.org/why/

Steve Brier and Joshua Brown, “The September 11 Digital Archive. Radical History Review. Issue 111 (Fall 2011). [Available as a pdf on the course Group site]

Claire Potter, “Because it is Gone Now: Teaching the September 11 Digital Archive” OAH Magazine of History (2011), pp. 31-34. [Available as a pdf on the course Group site]

Recommended: Bring an assignment that you have given to students for workshopping

October 23: WAC/WID, Digital Pedagogy, and the CUNY Context

Guest: Luke Waltzer, Director, GC Teaching and Learning Center

Mina Shaughnessy, Errors and Expectations. [Available as a pdf on the course Group site]

Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Chapters 1 and 2

Stephen Brier, “Where’s the Pedagogy? The Role of Teaching and Learning in the Digital Humanities” and Luke Waltzer, “Digital Humanities and the ‘Ugly Stepchildren’ of American Higher Education” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, “Teaching the Digital Humanities” section

International Network of WAC Programs (INWAC), “Statement of WAC Principles,” February 2014.

Peter Elbow, “High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing,” New Directions for Teaching and Learning, No. 69, Spring 1997. [Available as a pdf on the course Group site]

 

October 30: Gaming and Pedagogy

Guest: Kathleen Offenholley, Professor of Mathematics, BMCC

NRC Report:  How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition (2000), Chs. 1 & 2, 1-50; Ch. 7, 155-89; Ch. 10, 231-47.  Available online: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9853&page=1

James Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy? (2003) Ch. 1 (Introduction), Ch. 2 (Is Playing Video Games a “Waste of Time”?), Ch. 3 (What Does It Mean to Be a Half Elf), Ch. 4 (Situated Meaning and Learning), Ch. 7 (The Social Mind), Conclusion

Kimon Keramidas “What Games Have to Teach Us About Teaching and Learning: Game Design as a Model for Course and Curricular Development.” Currents in Electronic Literacy: 2010: Gaming Across the Curriculum. (Available at: http://currents.dwrl.utexas.edu/2010/keramidas_what-games-have-to-teach-us-about-teaching-and-learning)

Unit Three:  Contemporary Spaces and Mediations

**Paper 1 due by midnight, November 6**

November 6:  Textuality, Databases, and Data Mining

Guest presenter: Lisa Rhody, Deputy Director Digital Initiatives, GC

Jerome McGann, “The Rationale of Hypertext,” 1995. Available online at: http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html (but probably best read in its Sutherland Electronic Text version, 1997, available as a .pdf on the Group site)

Lev Manovich, “The Database,” in The Language of New Media, 212-43. [Available as a .pdf on course Group site].

Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives” PMLA 122, no. 5 (10), 2007, 1571-79.

Jonathan Freedman, N. Katherine Hayles, Jerome McGann, Meredith L. McGill, Peter Stallybrass, and Ed Folsom, “Responses to Ed Folsom’s ‘Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,’” PMLA 122, no. 5 (10), 2007, 1580-1612.

Daniel J. Cohen, “From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections.” D-Lib Magazine 12, 3 (March 2006). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march06/cohen/03cohen.html.

November 13: Distant Reading and Data Visualization 

Guest presenter: Micki Kaufman, GC

Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, and Trees, all

Lev Manovich, “What is Visualization” http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/what-is-visualization

Lauren Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings” American Literature 84 vol 4, 661-688

Stephen Few, “Data Visualization for Human Perception“

Mark Sample: “The Digital Humanities is not about building, it’s about sharing.“

Optional: Lauren Klein, “The Long Arc of Visual Display” (video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heUI6QmSdzc

Visualization projects: check out

November 20:  Open Source and Peer Production and Their Impact on the Intellectual Property and Copyright Regime

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006), Chapter 1. Introduction 1-28; Part One. The Networked Information Economy, 29-90; Chapter 8, “Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical,” 273-300; Chapter 10, “Social Ties: Networking Together,” 356-77.

Lawrence Lessig, REMIX: How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law in The Social Media Reader.

Lewis Hyde, Common As Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2010), 23-38. [Available on course Group site]

Fred Benenson, “On the Fungibility and Necessity of Cultural Freedom”; and Michael Mandiberg, “Giving Things Away is Hard Work: Three Creative Commons Case Studies” in Mandiberg, The Social Media Reader, Part V: Law.

Adeline Koh, “Imagined Communities, Social Media, and the Faculty,” Academe May-June 2016. https://www.aaup.org/article/imagined-communities-social-media-and-faculty#.V0cHOOc5mR4

The Free Software Definition at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Peer Production License at http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Peer_Production_License

Suggested:

Siva Vaidhyanathan and Tim O’Reilly selections from Part I: Mechanisms in Mandiberg, ed., The Social Media Reader, 24-52.

Adam Hyde, et. al., “What Is Collaboration Anyway?” in Mandiberg, ed., The Social Media Reader, 53-67.

Wikipedia Group Assignment: t/k

November 27: The Pedagogical Possibilities of ePortfolios

Guest presenter: Joe Ugoretz, Senior Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning, Macaulay Honors College, CUNY

Selections from:

Bret Eynon and Laura Gambino, High-Impact ePortfolio Practice: A Catalyst for Student, Faculty, and Institutional Learning, 2017.

Anne Donlon, Amanda Licastro, and Dominique Zino (eds.), Challenging the Boundaries of ePortfolio Scholarship,  JITP, Issue 10, https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/table-of-contents-issue-ten/

Macaulay ePortfolio gateway http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios

Tracy Penny Light, Helen Chen and John Ittelson, Documenting Learning with Eportfolios, Jossey-Bass, 2011

Wikipedia Group Assignment due

Unit Four: Current Political Economies of Technology

December 4:  The Digital Humanities and the Future of Academic Inquiry and Publishing

Guest: Matt Gold, Prof. of Digital Humanities, PhD Program in English, GC  

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence, Ch. 1 (“Peer Review”), Ch. 2 (“Authorship”), Ch. 5 (“The University”), & Conclusion.

Debates in the Digital Humanities, Ed. Matthew K. Gold (2012)

Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, Ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (2016):

Stephen Brier, “Confessions of a Premature Digital Humanist,”Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Issue 11 (Spring 2017), https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/confessions-of-a-premature-digital-humanist/.

 

December 11: The Dystopian Now: Digital Labor, Fake News, Troll Armies, and Algorithmic Power 

Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt eds, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm

Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text, 63 (Volume 18, Number 2), Summer 2000, pp. 33-58 (Article) http://web.mit.edu/schock/www/docs/18.2terranova.pdf

Trebor Scholz, ed, Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, Routledge, 2013. Read: Intro. Suggested: Ch 1, Andrew Ross, “In Search of the Lost Paycheck.” [Available as a pdf on course Group site]

Aaron Smith and Janna Anderson, “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs,” Pew Center, August 6, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/ (skim read for the analysis, skip all the raw data)

Sebastian Olma, “Never Mind the Sharing Economy: Here’s Platform Capitalism,” Institute of Network Cultures blog, October 16, 2014, http://networkcultures.org/mycreativity/2014/10/16/never-mind-the-sharing-economy-heres-platform-capitalism/

Hannes Grassegger & Mikael Krogerus, “The Data That Turned the World Upside Down,” Vice, Jan 28 2017, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win

AJ Vicens, “Twitter Has a Serious Problem” Mother Jones, APR. 14, 2017, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/04/what-twitter-going-do-about-disinformation-campaigns/

Twitter Audit: https://www.twitteraudit.com/realdonaldtrump

Suggested:

Simon Adler, “Breaking News,” Radiolab, July 27, 2017, 49 minutes, http://www.radiolab.org/story/breaking-news/

Samanth Subramanian, “Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex,” Wired, 2.15.17, https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/

Rachel Roberts, “Russia hired 1,000 people to create anti-Clinton ‘fake news’ in key US states during election,” Independent, 30 March 2017, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/russian-trolls-hilary-clinton-fake-news-election-democrat-mark-warner-intelligence-committee-a7657641.html

Joe Mande, “How I Learned to Game Twitter,” The New Yorker, November 28, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/how-i-learned-to-game-twitter

Jane Lytvynenko, “No, Donald Trump Did Not Gain Five Million New Twitter Followers In Three Days,” Buzzfeed, May 30, 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/janelytvynenko/no-donald-trump-did-not-gain-five-million-new-twitter

Nader Vossoughian, “Workers of the World, Conform!,” Triple Canopy, 2017, https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/22/contents/workers-of-the-world-conform

Sam Bright, “After Trump, “big data” firm Cambridge Analytica is now working in Kenya,” BBC, 3 August 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-40792078

TBD:  Final Paper Due via email