Faculty Fellow Courses

STS 3940 AI and Storytelling
(Co-meets with INFO 4940 Special Topics in Information Science, topic: AI & Storytelling - Lec 009)
Andrew Piper (McGill University, Milstein Program Visiting Scholar)
3 credits. Offered Spring 2025.
Interested students must apply.

This course explores what artificial intelligence (AI) can teach us about human storytelling. We'll tackle this question through a two-pronged approach: story understanding and story generation. In the first part, we'll delve into how AI and machine learning technologies have revolutionized our approach to analyzing narratives, allowing us to examine storytelling's social impacts and collective dynamics at large scale, rather than focusing narrowly on individual texts. We'll look into computational methods and concepts for modeling stories, moving beyond traditional analyses to a broader understanding of storytelling's societal effects. Course application due November 1.

ANTHR 3200 Heritage Forensics 
Also ARKEO 3200, NES 3204
Lori Khatchadourian (NES) and Adam T. Smith (ANTHR)
Fall. 3 credits.

This course provides students with an orientation to the new technologies reshaping the effort to preserve cultural heritage. The course introduces students to the tools that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing (especially aerial and satellite imaging) provide for advancing heritage preservation and detecting cultural erasure. Our focus will be on contexts where heritage has emerged as a site of conflict, from Bosnia to Syria to Ukraine. Students will develop proficiency in a range of spatial technologies and their application to the human past. The course will culminate in projects that use new technologies to save heritage at risk. 

MUSIC 4412/6412 Making Sound Futures
Marinthi Papalexandri-Alexandri (MUSIC)
Fall. 3 credits.

Making Sound Futures is a transdisciplinary, transformative, hands-on studio course that nurtures curiosity and promotes experimentation, intuitive decision-making, and risk-taking. Embracing imperfection and uncertainty, we will construct sonic instruments to facilitate self-discovery, promote understanding of others, inspire imaginative exploration, and serve as a tools for problem-solving. Our activities will include close listening to sounds and then designing new instruments, individually and collaboratively, to recreate these sounds and others that have not yet been imagined. Raising awareness about how we contribute toward the future, we will devote ourselves to creating materials and techniques that the next generation of students can use and develop further. We will aim to generate designs for the future that are themselves open to reuse and reimagination.

ARTH 3111 Making Photography Matter: A Studio Course with Andrew Moisey, Assistant Professor, History of Art & Visual Studies

A hands-on course devoted to the practical understanding of conception, production, and innovation in the photographic image world. Each unit of the course confronts a fundamental problem of contemporary photographic communication—quality of light, framing, series, post-production, publication design, to name a few example topics—from practical, theoretical, and historical perspectives. The goal of the course is to enrich students' understanding of how to make images that solve practical social and scholarly problems in an impactful, immediate, and public way.

ENGL 3615 Podcast, Radio, Gramophone: Literary Technologies of Sound with Jeremy Braddock, Associate Professor, English

This class examines current aural technologies of writing: podcasts, audiobooks, site-specific headphones theater. This course will focus on the challenges and opportunities of the present - making recordings along the way - from the point of view of the technologies' long history. 

GOVT 3042 The Politics of Technology with Sarah Kreps, Professor, Government

This course evaluates the politics of technology including topics such as drones, artificial intelligence, and cyber. 

STS 3440 Data Science and Society Lab with Malte Ziewitz, Assistant Professor, Science & Technology Studies

The next generation of thinkers will need a firm grasp on the practices and values implicated in designing and using data science tools. The class will sensitize students from the social sciences, humanities, and STEM to the complexities of data science as both a social and a technical project.