Instructor: Muranaka MWF 9:05 AM – 10:00 AM
How has the digital turn transformed our composing habits? On a daily basis, you’re likely inundated with information – from social media, from targeted advertisements developed algorithmically, and, lately, from artificial intelligence. Today, social and political movements often occur as much online as they do offline – but how and why is this possible? In this course, we will think about the ways in which ideas spread online and consider how information – packaged as digital writing – can be used to create social change. We will begin the course by creating infographics while sorting out what to make of mis/disinformation; we then move to the audio/visual space of podcasting and the proliferation of information. Finally, we’ll work to create an artifact appropriate to a social movement while considering how we might re-mediate digital projects through artificial intelligence software. The goal of this course is not to turn you into content creators, but to guide you through a series of practices in digital composing that you might use in your own projects. We often need to use multiple computational techniques to perform and share data-driven scholarship; to this end, we will interrogate the nuanced ways information technologies can shape – and alter – our cultural perception.