Teaching the Digital Humanities to a Broad Undergraduate Population

Questions No Computer Can Answer

When the federal act launching both the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) was signed into law in 1965, science was a driving force behind cultural change, and computers appeared to be automating much of human decision-making.1 Glenn Seaborg, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, told a Senate committee during consideration of the NEA/NEH act, “Science and technology are providing us with the means to travel swiftly. But what course do we take? This is the question that no computer can answer.”2

Asking questions that no computer can answer is one way to describe our approach to teaching the digital humanities (DH) when we present it to a wide audience of undergraduates in our Digital Humanity course—a cross-listed lecture that fills a general education requirement in Philosophical Thinking or Ethics at the University of Pittsburgh.3 Just as the founding of both the NEA and the NEH responded to an emphasis on science and computation lacking sufficient consideration of human questions in the 1960s, we see a similar need today for broad educational initiatives that consider what it means to be human alongside what has become—even beyond scientific initiatives—truly omnipresent computing. The humanities, like all disciplines, must not only grapple with what pervasive digitality means for our work; we also have an obligation to teach these implications to our students. To respond to this need in one small way as humanities faculty, the authors have designed an undergraduate course that considers human–computer relationships as a philosophy course that looks at these issues through the lens of personal impact on our students’ daily mental and physical lives. In our fifteen weeks with the fifty students enrolled in this lecture-lab-discussion course, we consider the following question: If computers are always by our sides, and often on or in our bodies at every waking moment, what does it mean to be human?

Digital Humanity was born from a desire to explore such urgent questions of pervasive digitality with undergraduate students who live this reality with ubiquitous computing but may not have had space or time to consider it fully. In this chapter we argue for the benefits of coteaching this cross-listed course to a broad population of undergraduates as just such a wide-ranging introduction to the digital humanities. Through the attachment to a general education requirement, the use of multimodal assignments, and a content focus on the humanistic aspects of digital computing, this course casts a wide net for DH, aiming to appeal to undergraduates who may not have adopted mindful uses of the digital yet or know much about what the humanities are. We find that this pedagogical framing helps students consider more carefully the role of digital computation in their daily lives. It also attracts students into relevant digitally focused majors and certificates. Additionally, actively engaging with the interpretive approaches of the humanities together with the pervasive digitality of the twenty-first century not only constitutes foundational knowledge within the digital humanities, but it helps college students make meaning of their lives in digital contexts.

The NEA/NEH act’s clear statement of the value of the humanities—one that ties a mindful and critical approach to the arts and humanities to a better understanding of the technologies that surround all those living in the United States today—parallels the critical vision we strove to embed within Digital Humanity. Enacting our vision of this particular introduction to many of the central concerns of DH, however, required jumping through a few institutional hoops. In our large public university, we have seemingly contradictory pressures on undergraduate enrollments: faculty have been encouraged to develop exciting new courses to attract students, yet undergraduates have to be savvy that the courses they take check off one or more boxes for their various degrees and certificates. Any innovative DH course must address these curricular needs, and so we have leveraged institutional tools such as university general education requirements and also used these same tools to encourage enrollment and support team teaching. In its design and content, our course is often cited by deans and administrators as an example of innovative and relevant teaching at the undergraduate level. Now regularly offered with dependable—even overflow—enrollment, Digital Humanity serves not only as a popular gen-ed course but also as an anchor for other, larger DH initiatives such as the new interdisciplinary School of Computing and Information–English major, Digital Narrative and Interactive Design, and an up-and-coming Digital Studies and Methods undergraduate certificate.4 In our professional lives, the experiences we have gained designing and teaching this course together have also allowed both of us to ask—generatively—even more questions that no computer can answer.

In what follows, we draw on our experience designing Digital Humanity across two departments and coteaching it for four years at the University of Pittsburgh. Through discussion of this course’s design and implementation, we suggest how readers might leverage institutional resources to launch and maintain undergraduate DH courses, model ways in which DH can fit productively into general education systems, and propose how such large, widely attractive courses can serve as tent poles for larger DH initiatives. We also draw attention to the deep personal and professional benefits of interdisciplinary coteaching and the issues surrounding the long-term viability of courses that depend on so many variables. Our institutional constraints are not unique, and so we offer our path through them as a possible model for others.

Course Ethos: Multidisciplinary Learning Outcomes and Technical Expectations

Our learning outcomes in Digital Humanity reflect both philosophical and applied approaches to computer–human interplay: students who successfully complete the course learn to critically examine the intersections between digital devices and human life, articulate ways that digital technologies may be used effectively and ethically in their academic and professional careers, assess their own work and audiences, and compose thoughtfully across multiple digital modes.5 These objectives respond to the contours of the Philosophical Thinking or Ethics gen-ed requirement in the School of Arts and Sciences, as well as preparing students for further work in digital composition and theory in their home disciplines or in digitally focused majors and certificates we have since launched. A critical examination of intersections between computers and humans in the context of this class means students learn to blur distinctions between human makers and human users, between “us” and “them,” in a digital space. That computers were designed by, operated by, programmed by, and used by humans is captured in a mantra we often repeat in the course: it is humans all the way down. Historical texts, projects, and lectures focusing on the women of ENIAC (the first general-purpose electronic computer), how computers could have been designed but were not, and the embedding of bias in algorithms support students in meeting this learning goal.

We steer students to demonstrate a more sophisticated understanding of the ways digital technologies affect their lives and the lives of others and to articulate ways that digital technologies may be used effectively and ethically in their academic and professional careers. In these critical learning objectives, students draw on their emerging understandings of computation in their own fields—including, for example, computer science, psychology, English, engineering, biology, and studio arts—as well as their life experiences. We also encourage students to explore computation within the contexts of their other courses and majors in their weekly posts and major projects, which we provide more detail on later in this chapter. The course thus aims to help students leverage critical insights from DH while embedded in a variety of fields outside DH.

Our assignments are also central to the course’s expansive approach to computers, as students both study computers and also work and compose with them in self-reflective ways. The course requires students to use digital computers to synthesize what they are reading and hearing both outside and inside the class. In weekly online posts, students compose image sequences, videos, audio recordings, links, and text and respond to each other’s work. In the midterm and final assignments, students synthesize course concepts in the form of a digital video. Because this is an introductory course, we never intended to teach any of these genres or technologies in depth, and we recognized that we were asking things of them that might range from nontraditional to the seemingly outlandish. Students are instead given models in the texts they are assigned and their peers’ posts, they are offered access to university-wide resources such as those found in Pitt’s University Library System, and the instructors and undergraduate TAs are also available for additional support.6 We have found that students largely enjoy and benefit from the multimodal approach to assignments within this scaffolded infrastructure, although they point out that these assignments generally take more time and creativity than traditional written work. We see this challenge as a benefit to their learning in the course. This combined work of studying about and composing with helps students to see themselves as knowledge creators, not simply students in a class.

While we consider Digital Humanity a unique course in its interdisciplinary, team-taught, gen-ed approach within the School of Arts and Sciences, related course genres exist, such as computers in society, information society, new media, and computer ethics. We researched such model courses both in our initial design process and in preparation for this chapter. We found that these pedagogical offerings were valuable in their own right, but there were few that reflected our desire to integrate the experience of being human with the experience of living with ubiquitous computing, from a humanistic point of view. “Computers in society” courses, especially those housed in departments of computer science, can sometimes contextualize computers for their students in a way that increases the divide between makers and users—something we were not inclined to do. “Computer ethics” courses, also a common computer science requirement, can seem merely handmaidens to the “real” work of computer science (the gendered valence here is intentional). This also was not the model that we wished to follow. We also did not think Digital Humanity was best situated as a course about “information” or the “information society,” as we were not teaching this class solely from the point of view of information studies. Similarly, content-based courses focused specifically on social media, artificial intelligence, or gaming often lived more strictly within disciplines and were thus not quite aligned with our integrative, multidisciplinary vision.

This course has a strongly multidisciplinary take, in part to appeal to students from all over the university but also to draw on our own expertise in information studies and art history (Alison) and writing studies and digital literacies (Annette). Alison’s expertise in art history, computer vision, and the organization of information and archives plus Annette’s interest in (counter)surveillance and computational literacy helped to inform the specific contexts we selected for our approach to each unit. From the perspectives of these human(itie)s, the course frequently tacks back and forth between machines and humans—for example, in discussions of technologies and histories of sous- and surveillance or various ways humans have automated themselves—helping students to recognize the interactivity between the multiple types of agency represented in these interchanges. Our shared interest in the history of computing, particularly in the shift from human and analog computers to electronic and digital computers, has also imbued the course with a sense that a historical approach can illustrate how computers work now as well as how they could work otherwise.

Resisting Teleology: Course Units

Digital Humanity’s course design resists a teleological narrative about computing in society as a progressive development of sophisticated devices with humans on the sidelines. Instead, it is organized into thematic units that cut across computational eras such as massive data, networks and control, physical bodies/computers, surveillance, education, and entertainment. Under these topics, we discuss both historical and contemporary questions about how computers work, what they can and cannot do, how they serve or do not serve us, and what they are made to do (in both senses of that verb). With this arrangement, we have found that thoughts and ideas that arise in one unit emerge again in another. Avoiding teleology in the course is important for reflecting contingencies in computational design, that we are not at the end of computational history and that computers could, and perhaps should, be designed and used in ways other than they currently are. We have changed the units over different iterations of the course, and—key to sustainability and transferability of the course—we see multiple paths into its goals and themes.

We have found our Computing in Education unit to be particularly productive in that it allows the students to contextualize our conversation about the mutual relationship between humans and computers in a context that they not only know well, but that they and the instructors inhabit together. The year we did not teach this unit, it was sorely missed. Indeed, it was reinstituted in spring 2020, and in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic that took place in the middle of the term, the conversations engendered by this unit became even more salient and precious. The weeks on different forms of surveillance, including typical top-down surveillance (e.g., government and corporate platforms) as well as bottom-up sousveillance (e.g., cell phone videos of authority figures) and mutual veillance (e.g., monitoring the social media profiles of others), have also held an especially strong draw year over year for the students, who often express to us in face-to-face meetings how little they knew about the ways computers can—and in many ways must—track our movement in order to operate efficiently.

Students are also fascinated by the unit on artificial intelligence and human–computer symbiosis, although when we ask them to consider themselves as cyborgs in one of our weekly WordPress posts, they (and we) are consistently surprised to see how much of the conversation surrounding augmentation and AI comes down to the human desire to get rid of perceived “failings,” while moving the bar of “perfection” out of human reach. And even more pressingly, when we ask students to recognize what labor is done “behind the scenes” to make digital computing possible (such as social media content moderators or their own labor to make money for Facebook and Instagram), it becomes increasingly clear that the quotidian reality of human–computer symbiosis is already here, and clearly extends far beyond any fantastic dream of “eyes that remember all of your reading for you” or “legs that can run and run and never get tired.”7 With mixed feelings, students often confront that we are already cyborgs, even when we do something as simple as scroll our social media feeds. Because this course is responsive to contemporary conversations about computation, future iterations are likely to explore more deeply the implications of generative AI for text, image, video, and sound.

Our units on games and computational creativity are ostensibly lighter fare. But we keep our focus on the fact that, even in play, our mutually coconstructed relationship with computers is present. The “gamification” of work and school experiences is closely tied to the integration of digital computing into everyday reality, and the games we play say just as much about our work life as they do about our capacity for fun. Similarly, the unit on computational creativity, which offers examples of artistic production that take digital computing as their medium, offers a vivid foil to the prior AI unit, sparking conversation about who—or what—can create art and for whom.

Over the years of teaching this course, we have noticed that the vast majority of students, even those in majors focused on designing or programming computers, feel that they have no agency over the computers in their lives. So in our final unit, we ask students to consider their roles as digital citizens—a nod once again to the mid-1960s ethos of the NEA/NEH act and a driving force for the course. With a focus on personal security, internet governance, and reflections on who we are online, we emphasize that we are all part of a century-old formation of a human–computer coagulation within which they have active agency. However, we find that many students ultimately throw their hands up, eschewing this potential agency. We consider this Digital Citizens unit one of the least successful, then, although we are not sure if any approach would encourage students to embrace their agency with computers more fully. At the end of the course, students are, at least, more cognizant of the roles of computers in their lives, whether or not they elect to exercise their agency in those relationships.

How It Works on the Ground: Course Interactivity and Assignments

The course unfolds each week in three sessions of fifty minutes each. Each of the class sessions includes time for some discussion and activities and is not meant to repeat content from the assigned texts but rather to extend and contextualize ideas from those texts. The first session each week is a lecture based on the assigned readings. The second session is devoted to “intrigue,” a name that emerged to describe our interactive, lab-inspired pedagogical activities. Example intrigues include playing with chatbots, doing binary math, a “Meme Madness” bracket where students vote on student-created memes, and an exercise where they use data from AOL’s 2006 ill-informed release of search data to guess at the characteristics and interests of searchers in order to debate privacy and data.8 The third weekly session is modeled on a traditional recitation in which the larger class of fifty students breaks up into two twenty-five-person sections for smaller conversations, each led by one of the two coinstructors of the course.

We selected “readings” to underscore the themes and objectives of the course, offering students traditional written texts, interactive online experiences, games, and short- and long-form videos. Some selections appear explicitly “philosophical,” such as Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” or selections from Michel Foucault and Safiya Umoja Noble.9 Such texts are complex and often take considerable contextualization in order for students to understand their connection to contemporary computing. Lectures break down key concepts and provide historical context and examples from everyday life, and recitation sessions allow for close reading. We connect Foucault’s concepts of the panopticon to the cultural force of Santa Claus and God; the impulses of gaming with masculine histories of exercise; and the educational software they are required to use with the commercialization of computation. We also offer materials that allow students at all levels of comfort with digital computers to learn more about the socio-technical environment surrounding computer science as a discipline, such as Paul Ford’s interactive piece “What Is Code?,” Kate Losse’s exposé of gender issues on Facebook, and selections from Meredith Broussard’s Artificial Unintelligence. Historical expressions of computer science such as Doug Engelbart’s 1962 Augmenting Human Intellect report are so removed from students that they serve as a wonderful corrective to some basic assumptions that computers were destined to be the way they appear to us now.

As we ask our students to work in media other than written text, we also assign “watchings” and “listenings” for them to engage with, such as an episode of the Secret History of the Future podcast on the Mechanical Turk, and “30 for 30 Shorts: The Schedule Makers,” an ESPN documentary on the couple who produced the schedule for Major League Baseball until 2003, when it was outsourced to computers.10 Responding to student suggestions, we have added episodes from Black Mirror, a contemporary science fiction show from the BBC, that demonstrate the themes of the class.11 Written works of fiction also appear scattered throughout the term.12 Journalistic pieces introduce students to more difficult, historical topics such as the lived experience of content moderators, the algorithmic bias in prison sentencing, or burnout among content creators.13 The historical reality that computers were once human—and often women, especially women of color—is yet another topic that surprises some students and galvanizes others.14

Assignments for the course ask students to compose thoughtful and novel responses to the concepts for each unit. Weekly WordPress posts provide a prompt for students to, for example, consider their own engagements with educational technology, what cyborg features they would like to have, or track what is tracking them each day as a college student. We require a certain format for each post—for instance, an audio recording under two minutes, a ten-image sequence, a drawing, or a short video—in order for them to practice these formats and to explore new modes of digital expression. Students, our undergraduate TAs, and the instructors all regularly respond to posts. Students often refer to each other’s posts in class discussion, and they indicate that they appreciate engaging with the work of their peers. In class discussions and assessment practices, we highlight the format and affordances of these digital modes, and we showcase particularly effective student responses.

Reflective, synthetic midterm and final projects require students to write their own questions, based on key terms and ideas we supply and with feedback from peers and us, and answer them with short, original videos. Video rather than traditional essay format is key to students’ new knowledge creation, we have found. When we allowed students the option to write essays as an alternative to video, we consistently observed that the essays were staid and formulaic, while the video work—even from students with no prior experience making videos—was consistently engaged, productive, and much more often astutely insightful. Essays often put forward three well-known points about contemporary issues in computation, whereas videos engaged camera angles, supercuts, sound, glitch, acting, animation, and fiction to generate fascinating speculations on our lives with computers. Because the video work is less familiar to students, we surmise that it forces them to create new pathways of knowledge rather than retread standard essay formats they have mastered in previous courses. Over repeated offerings of the course, then, we came to require, rather than offer, the video format for their reflective work. These reflective video projects are often novel to students, but they are scaffolded by the smaller, low-stakes weekly posts in which they compose their own videos, still-image sequences, written texts, and audio files, all the while drawing on the assigned multimodal materials.

The Practicalities of an “Innovative” Course in Today’s University

One key to the success of this class is our ability to teach it as a multidisciplinary, collaborative team. We draw on our individual expertise for the lectures, assignments, and activities in the course, and the sum is greater than the parts. Given its initial collaborative development, we fully recognize and are thrilled by the fact that the course could also be taught by individuals drawing on ideas of computing across different fields and life experiences from ours. And yet, as exciting and flexible as this origin story may be in principle, team teaching is a difficult bureaucratic hurdle at Pitt, as it is elsewhere. We offer here our path to the creation of this course through the specificities of our home institution with the hope that it can provide a model for others in their own spaces.

Our initial cotaught pilot of the course was sponsored by the Honors College, as a small-scale “topics course” that filled no requirements. This was a great gift to us, especially as it meant that the course was allowed to run with only eight students and gave us the chance to practice team teaching and map out the course format and objectives on a smaller scale. Teaching a small, committed group of learners and teachers helped us to better articulate and enact our pedagogical commitments. After this pilot, we were then able to successfully apply to the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences for the course to count for our general education Philosophical Thinking or Ethics requirement. The School of Arts and Sciences was just then revising the requirement from a traditional philosophy formation toward more contemporary questions of philosophical thinking outside the Philosophy Department, and our course served as a bridge to the new formation. To go through this approval process required wide-ranging collaborations and skillful shepherding with an encouraging dean. Reshaping the course to fill the philosophy gen-ed requirement was a practical solution to ensuring minimum enrollment for this new offering, but equally as important, it was also a welcome serendipity for us to reflect further on what this course meant to us and could mean to a wide population of undergraduates.

In its second and subsequent years, Digital Humanity has filled quickly with a fifty-student enrollment cap. The course is cross-listed in our home programs and departments (English Composition and History of Art and Architecture), and we have each been responsible for assessing the twenty-five students in our section of the course. For two of the three weekly sessions—lecture and intrigue (lab)—both sections meet simultaneously in one room; for the third session, the sections meet separately for discussion. This bureaucratic solution—the simultaneous meetings of two courses—has enabled us to coteach the course in an ongoing, sustainable manner.

The main drawback we have experienced in offering an exciting gen-ed option is that with only our two sections, it filled too quickly for most first- and second-year students to enroll. Filled with advanced undergraduates who have higher enrollment priority, it was effectively no longer an introductory course. It has functioned quite well even so, as students near the end of their undergraduate degree have shown themselves eager to take the time to reflect on their educational experiences and offer additional expertise based on their different majors in class discussions. We are always happy to hear from recently graduated seniors about the way the course has affected them in their early career—and we hear from a few each year. They note that Digital Humanity offers an entirely different perspective from any other course at the university, and so advanced students have not found this lower-level course to be retrograde in their educational trajectory. Newly expanded offerings make the course available to more students, and we have seen that students in all stages of their undergraduate education are finding the course relevant.

Digital Humanity as a Tent Pole for DH Initiatives

As an introductory general education course, Digital Humanity serves as a standalone exploration of digital life for some students, but also as a gateway for other students to more extensive work in DH within established and new programs within the School of Arts and Sciences. The course has been a driver of these DH initiatives in two key ways. First, it serves as a gateway course for a new major that bridges English to the School of Computing and Information (Digital Narrative and Interactive Design) and an upcoming undergraduate certificate we have designed that allies digital inquiry across various departments in Arts and Sciences (Digital Studies and Methods). Especially as it has grown into a multiple-section course, Digital Humanity has served as a platform from which to launch these other pedagogical initiatives and to connect otherwise-siloed faculty engaged in DH methods and inquiry.

The second key way that Digital Humanity has driven DH initiatives is through the establishment of trust between the two of us in our four-year collaboration on the course. Before developing Digital Humanity, we had known each other through the Digital Humanities Research (DHRX) initiative, a network of affiliated scholars that Alison has led or coled since 2012. The deeper understanding of each other’s disciplines and approaches to DH that we gained through coteaching has enabled us to be a cross-disciplinary keystone for various digital initiatives on campus.15 Curricular initiatives that we collaborate on include the Digital Narrative and Interactive Design major and Digital Studies and Methods certificate mentioned earlier and also the graduate certificate in the latter. Together, we have additionally been part of a core leadership team that applied for and won a prestigious grant from the Mellon Foundation to run a Sawyer Seminar titled “Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) from the Quantitative to the Digital Age,” which extends conversations about the digital beyond the DHRX and across campus and neighboring institutions. These are powerful benefits to coteaching in DH contexts, where strong research networks can be institutionally difficult to nurture because of their interdisciplinary nature, even as they are necessary to sustain collaborations on grants, event sponsorship, and other initiatives.

While bureaucratic forces still tend to silo DH work within departments at Pitt, our pedagogical collaboration has made space for us to learn from each other. It has enabled us to infuse a multidisciplinary perspective into all of the work that we do, even when it is ostensibly under a narrower, disciplinary banner. We have learned from each other in our overlapping interests in histories and cultures of computing, as well as in our personal pedagogical approaches. As a teacher of small writing courses, Annette was new to the large lecture format but learned from Alison’s examples of visually driven slides and interactivity. As a result, Annette has found herself giving more engaging, accessible, and synthetic talks not only in Digital Humanity but also in professional contexts. In turn, Alison, who has had more experience working in larger, lecture-based environments, benefited from watching and learning from Annette’s approaches to smaller group discussion (especially in our pilot, Honors College–based course) and also from her methods of giving feedback on student assignments—techniques of sensitive and cogent feedback inherent to the field of composition. Alison has taken this form of “close teaching” from her collaborations with Annette back into all of her teaching environments, whether large or small.

Sustainability is a central concern for many DH research initiatives, and our experience with Digital Humanity teaches us that sustainability is just as critical for DH pedagogical initiatives.16 Cross-disciplinary collaborations have enriched our personal and professional DH networks, and yet the connections we established are also challenging to sustain. After four years of coteaching Digital Humanity, our shifting roles as faculty will prevent us from coteaching in the near future. Now that Digital Humanity is a cornerstone to other DH curricula, it runs regularly in our respective departments, although with other instructors. The course’s unique configuration was based on our intersecting strengths, but it necessarily looks different in the hands of new teachers. The success of this course has created pressure to offer it consistently, but we welcome the challenge of supporting it for the long term because we believe in the mission to provide humanistic approaches to digital computing. Having scaled up Digital Humanity from an intimate Honors College pilot to a fifty-student lecture and discussion course, we are now considering how we might scale it up yet again to a standard course offered by various instructors to several hundred students each term. What learning goals should be maintained in order for the course to meet the role it now fills in our undergraduate curriculum? We are currently working on answers to such questions, in collaboration with new instructors and curricular administrators.

To enact our vision of Digital Humanity, we began with a desire to collaborate on a shared pedagogical project, but then also learned to draw on our personal connections through a burgeoning university-wide DH network, to collaborate from the vantage point of our individual disciplines, to garner sponsorship for a pilot version of the course, and then to leverage the university’s general education requirements in order to make our course sustainable. In this chapter, we hope to have passed on some of our lessons learned from this successful DH initiative so that others may choose to create and sustain similar initiatives.

Notes

1. 1. National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act. The text reads, in part, “An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future.”

2. 2. National Endowment for the Humanities, “How the NEH Got Its Start.”

3. 3. University of Pittsburgh, Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, “General Education Requirements.”

4. 4. University of Pittsburgh, “Digital Narrative.”

5. 5. See Langmead and Vee, “Syllabus for ‘Digital Humanity.’”

6. 6. Perhaps their peers were too strong an influence, as students sometimes emulated the first brave students’ approaches to an assignment. Alison is experimenting with having posts hidden until class time to avoid this “follow the leader” phenomenon.

7. 7. We have used two texts to highlight the labor of content moderation in social media, which often is the first time students learn of this kind of labor: Chen, “Laborers”—with a content warning—and Burrows, “They Called It,” as an alternative for students to learn about content moderation with fewer details about what is being moderated.

8. 8. We credit Lauren Rae Hall, a former Pitt PhD student, for the AOL exercise.

9. 9. Example philosophical texts include Foucault, “‘Panopticism’”; Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”; and Noble, “Challenging the Algorithms of Oppression.”

10. 10. Standage and Stevenson, “Box”; Garner, “30 for 30 Shorts.”

11. 11. For example, “San Junipero” (Harris, Black Mirror), which spurs conversations about human augmentation, virtual reality, and aging.

12. 12. For example, Stephenson, Diamond Age.

13. 13. For example, Parkin, “YouTube Stars.”

14. 14. Example texts we have taught: Light, “When Computers Were Women,” describes women in early computing programming; Nakamura, “Indigenous Circuits,” highlights contributions of Navajo women in chip manufacturing; and Melfi’s film Hidden Figures is a fun but hard-hitting feature on Black women in early computing at NASA.

15. 15. Examples of initiatives that the course indirectly contributes to include DHRX and Information Ecosystems.

16. 16. See, for example, an initiative Alison ran with her Visual Media Workshop at the University of Pittsburgh, the Socio-technical Sustainability Roadmap.

Bibliography

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24. University of Pittsburgh. “Digital Narrative and Interactive Design Major.” https://www.dnid.pitt.edu.
25. University of Pittsburgh, Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. “General Education Requirements.” https://www.asundergrad.pitt.edu/academic-experience/general-education-requirements.
26. Visual Media Workshop at the University of Pittsburgh. The Socio-technical Sustainability Roadmap. https://sustainingdh.net.