Classes

IS 19 (Fiat Lux Seminar): Homo Academicus : The University Professor and Its Critics [syllabus]
It is obvious to college students that university professors teach, but what is it that academics do? This seminar will examine the often arcane, sometimes peculiar, institutional mechanisms that define the activities of academics, including tenure, faculty governance, peer review, scholarly communication, research funding, and doctoral training. In each case, we will provide historical context and discuss major controversies, including relevance of humanistic education to contemporary life, the academic-industrial complex, and politicization of the classroom. The seminar will provide students with a more detailed map with which to navigate their own academic experience.

IS 19 (Fiat Lux Seminar): Securing the Information Highway: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier [syllabus]
Throughout the day, we make use of security technologies in order to prove our identity to others (ID cards), commit to contracts (handwritten signatures on credit-card receipts), pay for services (bus tokens), etc. As we conduct more and more of our social interactions through electronic networks, appropriate equivalents to these (often low-tech) security mechanisms must be designed. Through readings, lectures and discussions, this seminar will explore common security objectives — confidentiality, anonymity, commitment, payment, authentication, voting and proposed technical solutions (e.g., cryptography, biometrics, and watermarking) suitable for electronic environments. Framing them within their larger social context, we will compare these solutions with the earlier technologies they seek to emulate.

IS 240: Management of Digital Records [syllabus]
The management of electronic records, even if largely invisible to the public, is essential for maintaining institutional accountability; protecting the rights of citizens, employees, customers; supporting the efficient operation of contemporary organizations; perpetuating valuable forms of social memory; and providing important inputs to individuals' and collective identity formation processes. Yet, current electronic recordkeeping is in a state of relative neglect. At their most basic level, a large portion of electronic records problems are related to proper configuration and management of computer systems, for which actual and potential technological solutions abound. The bad news is that: (a) the behavioral, organizational, institutional and professional underpinnings are generally not yet in place to implement the technological solutions; and, (b) for certain types of digital objects (videogames, media art, etc.), there does not exist theoretical, technical, and/or practical consensus on the most appropriate (or even basic) records preservation strategy. This places a set of both profound challenges and abundant opportunities in the hands of MLIS/MIAS students about to enter the workforce. Thus, rejoice! In this course, we will build up a set of concepts, tools and strategies that information professionals can use to help shape more appropriate, valuable and sustainable recordkeeping systems. We will however keep it real by contrasting those with the messy recordkeeping environment in which we currently live.

IS 270: Introduction to Information Technology [syllabus]
I've designed this course to teach the fundamental concepts of information technology in ways relevant to professional practice in the library, archival, and informatics fields. The course focuses on teaching students fundamental concepts of computing --- such as architecture, modularity, performance, design, and protocol --- while situating and relating such concepts to the political, economic, and cultural environments that have given powerful valence to networked information technologies. The idea behind this approach is that these concepts will be continually accessed by students in their professional lives as they create strategic technology plans, evaluate and acquire applications for their organizations, contribute to policy discussions, design applications with engineers, identify business and social opportunities created by networked information technologies and communicate their expertise to others information professionals.

IS 274: Data Aesthetics and Design [syllabus]
The LIS curriculum has historically included a class on relational database design so as to train "systems librarians" in the design and management of computer-based library catalogs. In recent years however, the demand for data management skills as exploded, as almost every aspect of our lives is, in some form or another, captured, described, and rendered in data. New technologies for collection (e.g., embedded sensors), exchange (the Internet), and display (e.g., GIS) have generated an explosion of data. Today, professional, research, and creative practices increasingly depend on data and data processing, on the ability to understand and manipulate of large datasets, on drawing conclusions from or in some way adapting to complex quantitative observations of the physical world, on organizing, describing, exchanging, preserving, and searching vast amount of digital resources. It is with this in mind that Prof. Mark Hansen and I developed a course on "data science," aiming to address some significant stops along the "data pipeline," from collection technologies, to transmission, storage, visual analysis, modeling, and decision-making.

IS 282: Systems Design and Analysis [syllabus]
I haven't finalized the syllabus for this course yet, but it will more or less follow the structure designed by Phil Agre when it was taught in 2000, i.e., it will be primarily studio-based rather than lecture-based. The theme is likely to be our very own place of learning, the University.

IS 289 (PhD Seminar): Information as Evidence [syllabus]
Through close readings of scholarly works, this course will explore how certain objects --- e.g., records, books, statistics --- acquire their particular role as evidence of historical events, authorial intention, social phenomena, collective trauma or joy. We will pay special attention to the kind of interventions that must be staged so that these objects retain their evidential value while subjected to gradual decontextualization, physical degradation, and competition from contradictory evidence. We will thus understand information objects as dynamic entities, which must constantly be re-interpreted into the world, despite the traditional association of evidence and fixity. Another important theme of the class will be that of the relationship between memory and oblivion, of the processes of selection and exclusion inherent to archival practice. Rather than understanding oblivion as a failure of memory, we will try to examine ways it could be considered a felicitous outcome of archival practice.

IS 289: Digital Preservation [syllabus]
Cultural and scientific industries are today massively turning to digital media as the primary medium for the production and distribution of their products, either through digitization of cultural artifacts, creation of new forms of cultural expression and scientific experimentation (e.g., videogames, distributed simulations), or reliance on digital tools in the creation process itself (special effects, CAD). We are only begining to tackle the problem of preserving digital objects over time and already face risk of significant loss to our cultural heritage. The issue has been difficult to solve because of several interconnected issues: the definition of the "substance" of new digital forms has yet to stabilize through cultural and social conventions on authorship, authenticity, versions and performance; an absence of concepts with which to manage this problem in archival science, information science, or system designs; and the fact that economic, legal, and policy models appropriate for the long-term preservation of digital objects have yet to be developed. Thus, the nature of digital media mandates reformulation of traditional concepts of authenticity, authorship, and originals, new kinds of information systems to manage the preservation process, along with new economic, legal, and policy tools with which to manage digital information over the long term.

As more and more institutions find themselves faced with the problem of preserving digital holdings, demand for LIS graduates with expertise on this issue has grown accordingly. The course I designed provides an introduction to the problems and possibilities of long-term preservation for digital objects ranging from video games and websites to 3-dimensional architectural and engineering drawings. It introduces students to the technical issues underlying the field (e.g., migration, emulation), while also highlighting the organizational issues they will face as managers seeking to administer digital preservation programs.

IS 298C (PhD Seminar): Academic Work [syllabus]
The authority of scholarly knowledge depends not only on the observance of sound research methodologies, but on a number of other institutional mechanisms, including tenure, faculty governance, peer review, scholarly communication, public funding for 'basic' research, doctoral training, etc. Under the rubrics of service, teaching, and advising, a significant portion of the academic life is devoted to the management of these mechanisms, and their successful performance is a requirement for promotion at all levels of the academic ladder. In recent years, these long-standing institutional structures of the scholarly experience have come under important pressures, among others: growing reliance on contingent faculty and corresponding diminished relevance of faculty governance and academic freedom; globalization of "knowledge economies", and the role of the University as training facility for "flexible" workers and citizens; Rising costs of both scholarly communication and higher education and corresponding calls for open access to public knowledge and greater user of technology (online teaching, electronic textbooks, etc.); Growth of the academic-industrial complex, including increasing encroachment of economic concerns on independent scholarly inquiry (Krimsky 2003) and perceived irrelevance of humanistic/liberal arts education to contemporary life (Fish 2008), and redrawing of the boundaries between publicly-funded and privately-funded knowledge.

This course will examine current critiques of the contemporary environment for scholarship as well as concrete instances of requirements for academic professional performance, as an opportunity for students to futher their understanding of all dimensions of the scholarly experience. The course will complement methods courses concerned with the design epistemologically sound research in two ways: (a) provide participants with critical tools to analyse and proactively engage with the changes affecting the practice of scholarly inquiry and the institutions that support it; (b) enable future academic workers to identify and eventually develop the professional skills needed to conduct their preferred mode of scholarly inquiry.