Syllabus

Course Information

Professor: Lisa Marie RhodyEmail: lrhody@gc.cuny.edu
Course: DHUM / DATA 78000Website: http://cuny.is/GCPIT23
Location: Room 5417 for in person and Zoom for remote meetings (see below)CUNY Academic Commons Group: http://cuny.is/group-pit_fall-2023
Day / Time: Mondays, 4:15 PM – 6:15 PMZoom link:
See the pinned forum post
Office Hours: Monday 6:15 – 7:15 PM & by appointmentLink to Google Syllabus:

Format

This course will take advantage of a hybrid format wherein about ½ of the class sessions will take place in person and ½ will take place remotely. Please note that this is NOT a hy-flex class. In other words, if we are meeting in person, all students will be expected to be present in person. When we are meeting over Zoom, all students are expected to be on Zoom. Students can make use of the weekly classroom space in 5417 during remote weeks. During remote classes, please plan to be in a relatively quiet, distraction-free space with reliable internet access. Please do not join classes while driving, commuting, walking outdoors, in a noisy cafe, food court, shopping mall, or other space in which you are distracted or wherein your participation introduces unnecessary background noise into the meetings. Obviously, we all have the occasional issue (eg. someone doing repair work in the background, outdoor construction, a passing parade, etc…). It is useful to keep in mind that most of our remote courses will involve inviting an outside guest, and it is our responsibility to make that experience as pleasant for our guest and for others in the class as possible. If you foresee difficulties with this moving forward, please reach out to me immediately to discuss. 

Objectives

Upon completing this course, students will understand the broad outlines of the emerging field of Public Interest Technology and its relationship to allied fields such as Civic Tech, Public Tech Access, Social Justice and Technology, Digital Humanities, and Digital Cultural Heritage. Additionally, students will develop the ability to: 

  • Articulate a definition of Public Interest Technology.
  • Identify common issues related to researching, designing, developing, supporting, or evaluating public interest technology projects.
  • Connect contemporary issues in public interest technology to theoretical and historical perspectives on “the public,” “the commons,” or “community-based” solutions.  
  • Develop skills in multiple communication genres, such as writing reports, presentations, proposals, and evaluations that are a necessary part of PIT work. 
  • Evaluate PIT projects using multiple criteria to assess the effectiveness of PIT projects. 
  • Explore multiple career pathways to working in PIT including those in government, non-profit, for profit, educational, and entrepreneurial sectors.  
  • Write in a variety of forms typically found in PIT, such as web pages and blog posts, reports, proposals, reviews, public presentations, social media posting and/or podcasting, and/or long form research. 

Course Materials

  • Class Website: The course website will have all of the information on this syllabus and more. Immediately following the first class, the website will be the authoritative source of information about the course. Please check it regularly for updates to the schedule, resources, blog posts, and the syllabus itself: https://pit2023.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ 
  • Readings: Whenever possible, readings will be available through open access publication; however, in cases where they are not, PDFs will be available either through the Mina Rees Library’s electronic databases or in our CUNY Academic Commons group. You are welcome to purchase books if you choose. Updates to the reading schedule are likely to happen regularly in response to students’ interests, so check the website schedule each week to make sure you are fully aware of the expectations. 
  • CUNY Academic Commons account – If you do not already have one, please register here: https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/register/. 
  • Class Commons Group: Once you have your Commons account, request access to our class group here:http://cuny.is/group-pit_fall-2023. 
  • Zoom: Remote meetings will be held over Zoom. See the pinned post in the Group Forum.

Assignments & Assessment

Assessment for the course is designed to support the course’s objectives: to acquaint students with the topics, themes, challenges, approaches to, and ways of communicating about public interest technology. As a result, the course will require a combination of independent and group work, leading class discussions, presentations, blog post writing, proposal writing, and evaluative writing.  

In-class participation || 20% 

Class participation is a significant part of this course. Public Interest Technology’s orientation toward community involvement, human-centered design, and inclusion should be reflected in the way we interact with each other in person, through communication media, and in virtual settings. Therefore, we will want to integrate active listening, sharing, and collaboration into our course activities at all times. 

This course begins with the assumption that each person brings vital knowledge, experience, and perspectives to consider. The class’s interdisciplinary backgrounds and experiences are opportunities to learn about the narrowness of our own perspectives, and conversations should reflect students’ openness to discovering gaps in their understanding of how technology participates in the construction of our perception of “the public,” “community,” “accessibility,” “equity,” and “inclusion.” Constructive contributions to class are characterized by an individual and collective reflectiveness about traditional assumptions of power and privilege and one’s willingness to actively work against reproducing inequity. In other words, how might your participation (in the way that we communicate and compute) resist reproducing systems of power and privilege surrounding technology and computation? 

The design of this course is shaped by my own experiences as a feminist, technologist, and scholar. Consciousness-raising is an important part of any feminist practice, but it is not always easy–either to raise issues or to admit fault. Therefore, we will define constructive class participation as activity that fosters an atmosphere of trust that can be transformative. To understand a bit more about where I am coming from, you may want to read a blog post I wrote for “Day of DH” in 2013 titled: “What Can DHers Learn from Improv and Tina Fey?”

Blog Posts and Comments || 10%

Regularly, you will be asked to respond to the reading material through a 500 – 1000 word plog post, which will be published publicly here:https://pit2023.commons.gc.cuny.edu/posts/. Blog posts represent original writing that engages the week’s readings by making connections, extending ideas introduced in the readings, proposing a new approach to a long-standing challenge, etc. Effective blog posts demonstrate that a student has not only read the week’s assignments, but can efficiently contextualize their response for those who may not be familiar with the week’s readings. Blog posts should address a public audience, which includes other students in the class, the MA and MS programs, and a DH community. 

Facilitating Class Discussion || 10%

Each week one or two students in the class will be responsible for facilitating the first hour of class. 

On class days where there is a guest speaker, you will be expected to work with me to reach out to the speaker to get their bio (if we don’t have it already), to do some research on the kind of work that they do, and to generate a list of questions that you can ask to get discussion going. You will introduce the speaker to the class and then facilitate a Q&A. 

During classes where we do not have a speaker, you will be asked to come to class prepared to get conversation started and to facilitate discussion making sure that all students in the class have an opportunity to speak and attempting to make connections between contributions between classmates. During these classes, I will not intervene in the conversation until the end of the first hour. 

Book Report and Presentation / Study Guide|| 20%

Each student will choose and read one full book in addition to the readings on the syllabus. The books can either be selected from a list that I provide or can be proposed. Books should *not* be ones already covered in other courses, and should be relatively new to you. You will have about 5-10 minutes to discuss the book in class, but primarily, you will be asked to supply the class with a study guide that includes: 

  • A 1-page summary of the book
  • A ½ page review of the contributions the book makes to PIT
  • A list of key terms, concepts, and areas of PIT work that the book introduces or addresses
  • A list with page numbers of key quotes or “take aways” from the book

Book reports can be posted to the course blog or shared with the class as an electronic document as a Google Doc or Dropbox link using the Forums. Please do *not* submit the text for this assignment as a forum post.

Final Paper / Project || 40%

During the semester, you will encounter a number of different kinds of writing that are required within the field of public interest technology, such as investigative data journalism, interactive data visualizations, evaluations of PIT projects, case studies and proposals for human centered design projects, and public-education outreach that helps a public audience make use of existing tools. For your final project, you will choose one of these styles of writing and complete a 10-page writing assignment in that genre. For example, you may choose to do a data journalism project that explores an area of public data collection and use. You could also find an area where PIT practices are needed and write a proposal to design or redesign existing technology to address a public need. You could also write an evaluation or report on how an existing PIT project was designed, procured, and executed, and how successful that project was as a case study. You could also write a piece for a public audience about how machine learning might or does not suit public interest. 

You will write a 1-page project proposal due by 8 AM on Monday, November 20th. We will have individual meetings this week to discuss your project. Final projects are due on 12/20. 

Communication

  • Immediately following the first class, the website will become the authoritative site for assignments, schedule, updates to the syllabus, resources, and more. Please be sure to check the website regularly for changes. 
  • Our class Commons Group (https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/pit_fall-2023/) will be the primary vehicle for the distribution of information, updates, announcements, and class-wide conversation. Please make sure that your options for the group are set to receive individual emails for each post to the group forums. Students are encouraged to share information, converse, ask questions that are on topic and of direct relevance to the course via the group forum. Conversation online should reflect the same values we expect to see from one another in face to face conversation. 
  • Blog posts should be posted as visible to the public on the class website. You can log into the course website by logging into your CUNY Academic Commons Account, going to “My Sites” and selecting Public Interest Technology Fall 2023. 
  • Files will be shared through the forum and also in the Files section of the Commons group. 
  • To contact the instructor directly, please use email. Twitter and other social media methods may be tempting, but they will not receive a response for class purposes. 
  • Email will be replied to within 24-48 hours. If you have not received a response to your email after 48 hours, please follow up.
  • If you anticipate missing a class for any reason, please send an email in advance to let me know. Open lines of communication in advance of problems are always preferable to finding out after the fact.