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Weekly plan: class notes, assignments, etc
Thursday, January 25. Unit 1, Lesson 1
Unit 1, Homework 0: Preparation for Thursday, January 25 technical lesson
Unit 1, Lesson 1 Homework: Install day exercises. Some simple exercises to get familiar with files and running code, and to test that your system has been setup correctly. Due Wednesday night, January 31, 8pm
Tuesday, January 30. Slide presentation.
Thursday, February 1. Unit 1, Lesson 2: Algorithmic coding experiments.
Unit 1, Lesson 2 Homework, due Wednesday, February 7, 8pm.
Tue, Feb 6. Slide presentation.
Thur, Feb 8. Unit 1, Lesson 3: Variability on the command line & introducing images in Python Image.
Unit 1, Lesson 3 Homework, due Tuesday, February 14, 8pm.
Tue, Feb 13. No slides for today due to snow day. We'll cover this material next week and I'll post slides for it then.
Thur, Feb 15. Unit 1, Lesson 4: Images, image formats, pixels — filtering & generating
Thur, Feb 22. Unit 1, Lesson 5: Randomness, shaping probability distributions.
No new homework exercises assigned this week, but please note that there is a reading for Tuesday. Other than that, use your coding time this week to work on the Unit 1 Project due to present next week.
Thur, Feb 29. Unit 1 Project presentations
No new homework exercises assigned this week. Use your time to complete the final draft of Unit 1 Project, and work on your first written assignment. Next week in class we'll start working on some new coding techniques corresponding to unit 2.
What and how to read this week: Our discussion will focus on the Ruha Benjamin book so please start there and prioritize that. This is a recent and very influential book that touches on many really important ideas for the study of digital technology. I will use class time to explain and unpack some of these terms, but first try your best to understand them in your reading. I've included the introduction and chapter 2. We'll come back to this book and read chapters 4 adn 5 in a few weeks.
In addition to that, take a more casual look at the article titled "Metadata," and for this I only plan to talk about sections 2 and 3 as linked in the table of contents. This piece is written from the perspective of information science — a field associated with the organization of knowledge such as libraries, archives, and databases.
The two articles from Wired magazine are background for the technical work of Unit 2. We'll look at images from the Mallonee article in class.
Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Polity Press, 2019, Introduction and chapter 2.
Please note that due to the strike, we discussed the readings assigned above after spring break, on March 19.
Tue, Mar 5. Unit 2, Lesson 1: Experiments with data, data structures, and metadata (image Exif data).
Thur, Mar 7. Class today was a continuation of Unit 2, Lesson 1, held on Zoom in light of the strike. The class was recorded and is available here (in three parts because my personal Zoom only allows me to hold 40 minute meetings):
(Skim. Don't spend too much time on this piece. You'll be able to surmise the main thesis from a cursory read. The ideas of this piece are not what I'm hoping to be our main takeway this week. As you'll quickly see, the other two articles offer much more critical and nuanced takes on the questions raised by this first text. So I recommend trying to get the main idea of this piece, which you can probably do from the Preface, and move on to the other articles.) Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed (2010), pages 7-27
Janet Abbate, "Code Switch: Alternative Visions of Computer Expertise as Empowerment from the 1960s to the 2010s", Technology and Culture, 2018. (Optional: another excellent text by this author on this subject: "Coding is Not Empowerment", chapter 12 from Your Computer is On Fire, 2021.)
Miriam Posner, "JavaScript is for Girls", Logic magazine, March 15, 2017. (PDF available here.) Also check out the other references that are linked in the sentence that reads "innumerable articles and books have pointed out".
Tue, March 19. Presentation slides (on topics from Week 7 and Week 8)
Some videos:
Thur, March 21. Unit 2, Lesson 2: Web scraping, and visualizing network diagrams.
Please note: We have an exciting Code event this week!
Dead Links & Zombie Processes: Tamara Kneese in conversation with David Bering-Porter. Thurs, March 28, 5-7pm, Hirshon Suite, Arnhold Hall (55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor). I strongly encourage all to attend. It is open to the public so please bring friends or invite others.
Extra credit will be offered for attendance. Please see me if you are interested.
Please note: In preparation for our event this week, I have changed the readings and bumped the planned texts to next week. There are two required readings and three optional. (These are the texts due for discussion this week on Tuesday. Please post comments in the reading response document as usual.)
Tamara Kneese, Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond (Yale University Press, 2023). I have posted the entire book, but let's focus our reading and discussion on the Introduction (pages 1-29)
(Optional.) Here also is an interview with Kneese in The Guardian: "Tech platforms haven’t been designed to think about death", by Zoë Corbyn. This much shorter piece offers a very brief gloss on some of the ideas in the book. If you would like to start with a short overview, look here, but it does not go into as much depth as the Introduction from the book. by
Tue, March 26. We did not used slides for ourt discussion today.
Thur, March 28. Unit 2, Lesson3: Markov algorithm, starting with our Markov data structure
Please note:: This topic was originally planned for last week, but moved to this week to accommodate some readings in anticipation of our event with Tamara Kneese and David Bering-Porter on March 28.
Tue, April 2. Slide presentation
Thur, April 4. Unit 2, Tutorial 4 Lesson: More on our Markov chain algorithm, and review of data scraping (notes to come)
No in-person class sessions this week. Instead we will be meeting one-on-one for our Integrated-Advising Seminar sessions. Please see the sign up sheet and select a time slot for our meeting.
Tue, April 9. Class slide presentation
Thur, April 11. Unit 2 project presentations
There is no homework assigned this week since we had work presentations instead of a technical lesson.
Thur, April 25. Unit 3, Lesson 1: Introduciton to HTML & CSS
Thur, May 2. Unit 3, Lesson 2: CSS & Multimedia
No homework today, other than to work on the second written assignment and Unit 3 Project (see link above)
Thur, May 9. Presentations
Course evaluations — Please complete course evaluations for our class and all your classes this semester.
The following two groups of readings were originally planned for weeks 14 & 15, but due to a snow day, our special event, and other disruptions this semester, they were bumped back. I'm happy to consider them both optional for anyone who would like extra credit. Reading response grades will be determined based on 11 total required reading responses. If you have missed any of those consider doing either or both of these as a make-up. (You're welcome to submit this as extra credit if you have completed all 11.)
I encourage you all to read these texts, as they are fascinating and build on ideas we've been talking about the last couple weeks, but we will not dedicate extended time in class to a full discussion. If you would like to discuss any of these ideas I would be happy to in office hours.