Online syllabus: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/sengers/Teaching/sts634/index.php
Topic
This course provides an introduction to
Information Studies, i.e. historical, sociological,
qualitative, and critical approaches to computing.
The central theme for this year's class is interpretation.
As anyone who has designed or used computer applications is
aware, users' interpretations of what soft- and
hardware are for
and their meanings for them in their everyday lives can
differ substantially from those of their designers. One goal of this class is to analyze these processes of interpretation in practice. How
do users, designers, marketers, and other mediators develop
their interpretations of who users are, what they will
be doing with software, what activities are worth supporting
and which are not, and what applications will mean in
their everyday, ongoing use?
At the same time, as analysts of information technology (IT) - whether as builders or evaluators of designed systems, social scientists studying how people interact with and through computers, or as researchers analyzing the social and historical nature of IT practice - we, too, are engaging in processes of interpretation. In reflecting on interpretation, we are therefore also reflecting on our own practices: what sorts of interpretation do we consider to be reliable or useful and why? What relationships are we setting up between ourselves as researchers and the subjects of our research, and what implications does this have - epistemological, social, or political - for the kinds of knowledge we produce? What novel forms of interpretation might we wish to consider?
We will answer these questions through a two-pronged approach:
- We will ground our discussions methodologically by exploring critical theories of interpretation and meaning through the works of thinkers like Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger. This will allow us to identify major issues around interpretation and apply them to the case of computing applications.
- We will analyze a variety of answers to these questions arising from Science & Technology Studies, Information Science, and critical design.
This is a graduate-level course aimed at students from a broad variety of backgrounds, including but not limited to Science & Technology Studies, Information Science, Communication, and Visual Studies. There are no fixed pre-requisites for this course but some familiarity with the humanities at an undergraduate level is strongly recommended. Graduate standing is expected but advanced undergraduates may contact the instructor for permission to take this course.
If you have questions, please contact the instructor, Phoebe Sengers, at sengers @ cs.cornell.edu.
You can download the syllabus in print-friendly format.
| Topic |
Tuesday |
Thursday |
| Introduction |
| Introduction |
Jan 23
Introduction to class
|
Jan 25
What does it mean to interpret?
Culler: Language, Meaning, and Interpretation
|
| Faith and Suspicion |
| Finding meaning in structure |
Jan 30
Systems thinking
Gere: The Cybernetic Era
Saussure: Part One: General Principles, from Course in General Linguistics
|
Feb 1
The politics of information
Turner: The Shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor
|
| Upsetting structures |
Feb 6
Hermeneutics of suspicion
Williams: Ideology
Foucault: Nietzsche, Freud, Marx
|
Feb 8
Suspicions about IT
Forsythe: New Bottles, Old Wines
Dunne: Psychosocial Narratives
Dunne and Raby: Designer as Author
|
| Psychoanalysis |
Feb 13
Finding meaning in the detritus of life
Freud: On Dreams (read only pp. 142-166)
Ricoeur: The Conflict of Interpretations (read only pp. 20-28 and 32-36)
|
Feb 15
Interpretation, or science?
Gaver et al: Presence Project (excerpts)
Homework: Proposal for short paper I due
|
| Understanding being in the world |
| Philosophical hermeneutics |
Feb 20
Horizons of understanding
Heidegger: Being and Time (excerpts)
Gadamer: Truth and Method (excerpts)
|
Feb 22
Horizons of Artificial Intelligence
Winograd and Flores: Understanding Computers and Cognition, pp. 3-124
|
| Ethnography |
Feb 27
Defining ethnography
Dourish: Social Computing
Geertz: Thick Description
Homework: Short paper I due
|
Mar 1
Ethnography of IT and its discontents
Forsythe: Studying Those Who Study Us (Chapter 9)
|
| Ethnography II |
Mar 6
Breaking down at copiers
Suchman: Plans and Situated Actions, pp. vii-x, 1-4, 27-39, 49-67, 98-109, 118-181, 185-189
|
Mar 8
Situated actions
|
| Interlude: Ethnography Do-It-Yourself |
Mar 13
Emerson et al.: Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes: Chapters 1-5
|
Mar 15
|
| Juggling Meanings |
| Deconstruction |
Mar 27
Reconstructing deconstruction
Culler: pp. 85-156 of Chapter 2, On Deconstruction
|
Mar 29
De/re-constructing IT
Agre: Metaphor in Practice (start on p. 28, "Language in Practice")
|
| The proliferation of meanings |
Apr 3
Production of identities
Homework: Short paper II due
|
Apr 5
Proliferating meaning in design
|
| What happened to truth? |
Apr 10
Finding back to valid interpretations
Hirsch: Validity in Interpretation: Chapters 1, 2, 5
|
Apr 12
Final Project Workshop
Homework: Ideas for possible final projects due
|
| Re-Interpreting Interaction |
| Interpretive Flexibility and Re-appropriation |
Apr 17
Interpretive flexibility
How Users Matter: Oudshoorn and Pinch: Introduction, Laegran: Escape Vehicles?
|
Apr 19
Re-appropriating technologies
Homework: Group final project proposal due
|
| Interpreting Users |
Apr 24
Defining users and their behaviors
Woolgar: Configuring the User
Akrich: The De-Scription of Technical Objects
How Users Matter: Wyatt: Non-Users Also Matter
Homework: Short paper III due
|
Apr 26
Configuring personas
|
| Project Workshop |
May 1
Oral Presentations (Class will be rescheduled)
|
May 3
Oral Presentations/Wrap-Up (Class will be rescheduled)
|
| May 14: Final Projects Due |
Assignments
The assignments in this course are designed to foster the development of critical reading and argumentation skills essential to the humanities. Many humanities seminars culminate in one large paper at the end of the semester, but I have found it is easier on students and more conducive to learning, especially when students have disparate backgrounds, to maintain a 'steady burn' of work and feedback throughout the semester.
Your work for the class will consist of the following components: a fairly substantial reading load, with brief weekly reading responses and 3 short papers building on course materials which build up to a group final project.
Regular attendance is expected and is essential to acquire a full understanding of course content.
Reading Responses
The most important work you will do in this class are the course readings. They contain the core course content and are designed to deepen your reflection on issues of interpretation that will pay off in a wide variety of research areas. You are expected to have thoughtfully read the day's reading prior to coming to class. I strongly encourage you for your own benefit to keep written notes of your reading annotated with page number. Course reading varies considerably in difficulty; be aware that reading length does not greatly correlate to expected reading time.
To encourage your engagement with the readings, you will do brief weekly reading responses, which are due on the discussion boards on our Blackboard site by Monday at 1pm. These responses have two components.
1. One-paragraph description of one of the week's readings (or, in the case of a book, one chapter of the readings), that summarizes the argument made and the evidence being used in support of that argument. The best description of each reading will be chosen to add to an annotated bibliography for the course we will develop over the course of the semester. Please post your description to the "Bibliography" bboard.
Reading descriptions will be graded on a check-plus, check, and check-minus basis. You may skip two descriptions over the semester without penalty.
2. One-paragraph response to the reading you have summarized. You may choose the form of your response; some examples include:
- Discussion of an issue or problem raised by that reading that you find interesting.
- A link to a related news article or short piece from outside of class with brief discussion of the relationship.
- A comment on or further discussion of someone else's reading response.
Please post your response to the "Responses" bboard. Reading responses are graded on a pass/fail basis. During the course of the semester, you may skip 2 of them without penalty.
Final project
The final project for this course will be a collaborative group project involving all course members on the interpretation of in-car GPS navigation systems. These systems are becoming ubiquitous in higher-end new cars, but remarkably little has been written about how users appropriate them and make them meaningful in their everyday driving activities, nor about how designers interpret the expected activities of users in their design. Our goal for the final project will be to address this hole in the literature by developing an empirically and analytically grounded analysis of GPS navigation systems. We will develop this project over the course of the semester and use itas a platform to explore course topics.
Short papers
You will write three short (5-7 pages) papers for this class. The topics of the papers are as follows:
- Paper I: You may write on any topic you choose related to the course content in the unit on "Faith and Suspicion." You are strongly encouraged to choose topics related to your research interests outside of class.
- Paper II: You will write up one carefully selected incident around the use of in-car GPS navigation systems, in the style of ethnographic writing (ca. 4 pages). You will also reflect on your ethnographic observations and link your thoughts to the literature in the unit on "Understanding being in the world" (ca. 2 pages).
- Paper III: You will choose a topic related to the final project. You must discuss to some extent reading from the previous unit ("Juggling Meanings") but may discuss equally or more any other content from the course, as appropriate for your argument.
Your short papers should include proper citations to the literature in a consistent format. A good paper will include balanced, strong, original argumentation engaging with the course readings and on-going discussion. You will hand in a one-paragraph informal paper proposal for each short paper to get early feedback on the topic you have chosen.
Grading
Alterations to these assignments are always possible
upon approval of the instructor.
Grading formula:
- Weekly Responses: 15%
- Short Papers: 45%
- Final project: 30%
- Class and on-line discussion: 10%
Grading is not just a matter of numbers, but also of
judgment. The instructor reserves the right to adjust
grades by up to half a letter grade based on knowledge
of your performance not summed up in this tidy formula.
Texts
The following texts are required for this course. Where noted, we will use only a subsection of the text, but too much to be allowed to incorporate the excerpts into the course reader, for copyright reasons; you may choose to rely on library texts or other resources for these works. Many of these texts are widely available second-hand.
- Jonathan Culler. On Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. [We will use only Chapter 2. Note: this book is temporarily out-of-print but is widely available second-hand.]
- Paul Dourish. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. [We will use only Chapter 3.]
- Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago, U. Chicago Press, 1995.
- Diana E. Forsythe. Studying Those Who Study Us. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford U.P., 2001. [We will use only chapters 3, 7, and 9]
- E.D. Hirsch. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1973.
- Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch, eds. How Users Matter. MIT: MIT Press, 2003.
- Ferdinand de Saussure. Course in General Linguistics. Open Court, 1986. [We will use only Part I: Nature of the Linguistic Sign; a different publisher is fine; this book is widely available second-hand.]
- Lucy Suchman. Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
- Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. Understanding Computers and Cognition. Addison-Wesley, 1986.
- STS 634 Course Packet.
All other readings will be made available on-line.
Please note that many of the readings that are available on-line are only available if you access the links from within Cornell networks.