Academics
Fall 2017

Fall 2017

Graduate Courses

NWMEDIA 200 (4 units)

History and Theory of New Media
(Also TDPS 266)
A. De Kosnik

This graduate seminar is one of the core requirements for the Designated Emphasis in New Media, offered by the Berkeley Center for New Media. This course will provide participants with a foundation in new media studies (major works, authors, historical events, objects, and schools of thought), such that they will be able to compile reading lists for their qualifying exams, bibliographies for their dissertations, and syllabi for their courses on topics related to new media. It will develop participants’ skills in analyzing new media texts and artifacts, articulating their insights in speech and writing, and developing individual new media research projects.

NWMEDIA 201 (3 units)

Questioning New Media
Jill Miller

Held in conjunction with the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium which brings internationally-known speakers to campus to present their work on advanced topics in new media: http://atc.berkeley.edu. Students will enhance skills in questioning new media: how to think critically about new media, how to use new media resources to research pioneering work in new media, how to form incisive questions about new media, and how to evaluate and create effective presentations on topics in new media.

NWMEDIA 240G

Philosophy and Automation

Luciana Parisi

This seminar series offers critical reflections about the philosophical, aesthetic and political consequences of the increasing dominance of automated systems in contemporary culture. In particular, it is set to explore the tension between computation and philosophy, ratio and logic, measure and metaphysics as a central to our understanding of technology today. It will explore the tension between cybernetics as the efficient machine of reasoning and metaphysics as the model of theoretical thinking. By engaging with critical and post-critical approaches to the role of the machine (medium and instrument) in Western culture, the seminars will discuss the ontological possibilities stemming from the alliance between gender and automation, race and techne, and other alien figurations of subjectivity.

NWMEDIA 290-001 (4 units)

Post-Secular Ritual: Religion, Ritual, and Performance
A. Kazmi

Bringing many divergent discourses into dialogue, this course will investigate the paradoxical links between the religious and the secular as it plays out in Western societies today. In the process of interpreting respective instances of dislocation within minority or marginal communities, we will examine how adherence to religious impulses provides systems of social cohesion and gives a sense of continuity and a sense of belonging (historical, familial, personal). Within this context, we will examine the role of ritual and performance to articulate postmodern and post-secular tendencies to produce new ontologies and new modes of being in this world.

Specifically, we will look to performance art to provide a new perspective in reading cultural and religious behavior, sanctioned and unsanctioned forms of transgressions/relationships, rituals, incarceration, and other political struggles. In what ways does performance art become a laboratory for reimagining notions of community, citizenship, power and responsibility? How does performance strategy embody these ideas outside the realm of language? How does the enacted fiction of performance complicate the space between an event, its meaning, and its viewer?

NWMEDIA 290-003 (4 units)

Critical Practices: People, Places, Participation
J. Miller

A hands-on, studio design course where students work at the intersection of technological innovation and socially engaged art. Students will integrate a suite of digital fabrication tools with social design methods to create work that engages in cultural critique. Working with innovative technologies and radical, new art practices, this course will explore: hybrid art forms, critical design for community engagement, interventions in public spaces, tactical media and disobedient objects. These new making strategies will reframe our notions of people, places and participation.

NWMEDIA 290-003 meets the Graduate Certificate in Global Urban Humanities elective requirement.

NWMEDIA C262 (4 units) / laboratory also required

Theory and Practice of Tangible User Interfaces
Kimiko Ryokai

This course explores the theory and practice of Tangible User Interfaces, a new approach to Human Computer Interaction that focuses on the physical interaction with computational media. The topics covered in the course include theoretical framework, design examples, enabling technologies, and evaluation of Tangible User Interfaces. Students will design and develop experimental Tangible User Interfaces using physical computing prototyping tools and write a final project report.

ART 218-1 (4 units)

Theory and Criticism
A. Walsh

Weekly meetings will provide a forum for the discussion of issues related to assigned readings in the fields of esthetics, theory and art criticism.

ESPM C252-001 (3 units) / also ANTHRO C254-001, HIST C250-001, STS C200-001

Topics in Science and Technology Studies
M. Mazzotti

This course provides a strong foundation for graduate work in STS, a multidisciplinary field with a signature capacity to rethink the relationship among science, technology, and political and social life. From climate change to population genomics, access to medicines and the impact of new media, the problems of our time are simultaneously scientific and social, technological and political, ethical and economic.

INFO 202 (2 units)

Information Organization and Retrieval
D. Bamman, R. Glushko

Organization, representation, and access to information. Categorization, indexing, and content analysis. Data structures. Design and maintenance of databases, indexes, classification schemes, and thesauri. Use of codes, formats, and standards. Analysis and evaluation of search and navigation techniques.

INFO 213-001 (4 units)

User Interface Design and Development
R. Youmans

User interface design and human-computer interaction. Examination of alternative design. Tools and methods for design and development. Human computer interaction. Methods for measuring and evaluating interface quality.

INFO 216-001 (3 units)

Computer Mediated Communication
C. Cheshire

This course covers the practical and theoretical issues associated with computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems (e.g., email, newsgroups, wikis, online games, etc.). We will focus on the analysis of CMC practices, the relationship between technology and behavior, and the design and implementation issues associated with constructing CMC systems. This course primarily takes a social scientific approach (including research from social psychology, economics, sociology, and communication).

INFO 256 (3 units)

Applied Natural Language Processing
M. Hearst

This course examines the state-of-the-art in applied Natural Language Processing (also known as content analysis and language engineering), with an emphasis on how well existing algorithms perform and how they can be used (or not) in applications. Topics include part-of-speech tagging, shallow parsing, text classification, information extraction, incorporation of lexicons and ontologies into text analysis, and question answering. Students will apply and extend existing software tools to text-processing problems.

INFO 290-001 (1–4 units)

D. Bamman

INFO 290-005 (1–4 units)

Machine Learning in Education
Z. Pardos

INFO 290A-003 (1–2 units)

Social Data Revolution
A. Weigend

Free communication has changed the world, including the expectations and work and play. The class begins with the two data revolutions– the first about passively collected clicks on the web, the second about actively contributed data, as platforms like Facebook empower individuals to contribute a variety of quantitative and qualitative data (transactions, social relations, attention gestures, intention, location, and more.) With active student participation, we explore the far-reaching implications of the consumer data revolution for individuals, communities, business, and society.

JOURN 216 (2–3 units)

Multimedia Reporting
J. Rue & R. Hernandez

For journalists, the World Wide Web opens a powerful way to tell stories by combining text, video, audio, still photos, graphics, and interactivity. Students learn multimedia-reporting basics, how the web is changing journalism, and its relationship to democracy and community. Students use storyboarding techniques to construct nonlinear stories; they research, report, edit, and assemble two story projects.

THEATER 201 (4 units)

Performance Theory
S. Jackson

This core seminar for graduate students focuses on key issues in the theory of performance, with an emphasis on contemporary theoretical inquiry. Topics can include issues of representation and identity, presence, community, social efficacy, space, corporeality, audience, and transnational flows.

Undergraduate courses

NWMEDIA 190-001 (4 units)

Post-Secular Ritual: Religion, Ritual, and Performance
A. Kazmi

Bringing many divergent discourses into dialogue, this course will investigate the paradoxical links between the religious and the secular as it plays out in Western societies today. In the process of interpreting respective instances of dislocation within minority or marginal communities, we will examine how adherence to religious impulses provides systems of social cohesion and gives a sense of continuity and a sense of belonging (historical, familial, personal). Within this context, we will examine the role of ritual and performance to articulate postmodern and post-secular tendencies to produce new ontologies and new modes of being in this world.

Specifically, we will look to performance art to provide a new perspective in reading cultural and religious behavior, sanctioned and unsanctioned forms of transgressions/relationships, rituals, incarceration, and other political struggles. In what ways does performance art become a laboratory for reimagining notions of community, citizenship, power and responsibility? How does performance strategy embody these ideas outside the realm of language? How does the enacted fiction of performance complicate the space between an event, its meaning, and its viewer?

NWMEDIA 190-003 (4 units)

Critical Practices: People, Places, Participation
J. Miller

A hands-on, studio design course where students work at the intersection of technological innovation and socially engaged art. Students will integrate a suite of digital fabrication tools with social design methods to create work that engages in cultural critique. Working with innovative technologies and radical, new art practices, this course will explore: hybrid art forms, critical design for community engagement, interventions in public spaces, tactical media and disobedient objects. These new making strategies will reframe our notions of people, places and participation.

AFRICAM C134 (4 units)

Information Technology and Society
M. S. Laguerre

This course assesses the role of information technology in the digitalization of society by focusing on the deployment of e-government, e-commerce, e-learning, the digital city, telecommuting, virtual communities, internet time, the virtual office, and the geography of cyberspace. The course will also discuss the role of information technology in the governance and economic development of society

ART 21-001 (4 units)

Digital Photography: The Image and the Hive Mind
Staff

This class provides a basic foundation for digital photography with hands-on instruction in the use of digital cameras and online image dissemination. Topics include image capture, composition, image syntax, image analysis, image manipulation, metatext production, and image sequencing for visual narratives. We also study image dissemination through online networks including social networks, blogs, news, storage, search, and print services. Rather than limiting the discussion of photography to the production of the photographic image itself, we explore in written assignments how the reception of images can change based on context, usage, and network dynamics. While we rely on required DSLR digital cameras to produce images for weekly photographic assignments, we also experiment with alternate digital image generation techniques from telescopes to microscopes. All coursework will be posted and discussed online as well as in weekly lectures, workshops, and critiques. Course readings cover the history of photography, the theory of photographic reproduction and the theory of networked and memetic dissemination.

ART 171-001 (4 units)

Digital Video: The Architecture of Time
Staff

This hands-on studio course is designed to present students with a foundation-level introduction to the skills, theories and concepts used in digital video production. Non-linear and non-destructive editing methods used in digital video are defining new “architectures of time” for cinematic creation and experience, and offer new and innovative possibilities for authoring new forms of the moving image. This course will expose students to a broad range of industry standard equipment, film and video history, theory, terminology, field and post-production skills. Students will be required to technically master the digital media tools introduced in the course. Each week will include relevant readings, class discussions, guest speakers, demonstration of examples, and studio time for training and working on student assignments.

ART 178 (4 units)

Game Design Methods
G. Niemeyer

This course offers an introduction to game design and game studies. Game studies has five core elements: the study of games as transmitters of culture, the study of play and interactivity, the study of games as symbolic systems; the study of games as artifacts; and methods for creating games. We will study these core elements through play, play tests, play analysis, and comparative studies. Our reading list includes classic game studies theory and texts which support game design methods. After weekly writing and design exercises, our coursework will culminate in the design and evaluation of an original code-based game with a tangible interface.

COMPSCI 10 (4 units)

The Beauty and Joy of Computing
D. Garcia

An introduction to the beauty and joy of computing. The history, social implications, great principles, and future of computing. Beautiful applications that have changed the world. How computing empowers discovery and progress in other fields. Relevance of computing to the student and society will be emphasized. Students will learn the joy of programming a computer using a friendly, graphical language, and will complete a substantial team programming project related to their interests.

COMPSCI 160 (4 units)

User Interface Design and Development
Staff

The design, implementation, and evaluation of user interfaces. User-centered design and task analysis. Conceptual models and interface metaphors. Usability inspection and evaluation methods. Analysis of user study data. Input methods (keyboard, pointing, touch, tangible) and input models. Visual design principles. Interface prototyping and implementation methodologies and tools. Students will develop a user interface for a specific task and target user group in teams.

COMPSCI 188 (4 units)

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
Staff

Basic ideas and techniques underlying the design of intelligent computer systems. Topics include heuristic search, problem solving, game playing, knowledge representation, logical inference, planning, reasoning under uncertainty, expert systems, learning, perception, language understanding.

ENVDES 1 (3 units)

Introduction to Environmental Design
N. De Monchaux

This course will teach anyone how to start to be a designer, not just of drawings and objects, but also buildings, landscapes, and urban spaces. And not just in isolation, but in the complex web of ecological and man-made systems which makes up our shifting environment. You will take from the course first-hand experience of drawing, measuring, and design which form the basis of the professions of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning and which culminate in a final design project in the course. The course is open to all undergraduate students.

FILM 26 (4 units)

Moving Image Media
J. A. Skoller

The objective of this class is to provide a basic technical foundation for digital video film production while emphasizing the techniques and languages of creative moving image media from traditional story genres to more contemporary experimental forms. Training will move from pre-production-scripting and storyboarding, through production, including image capture, lighting and sound recording, to post-production with non-linear digital editing programs such as Final Cut Pro and editing strategies and aesthetics. The course will consist of lectures/screenings, discussion/critique, visiting artists, and production workshops in which students produce a series of exercises and a final project.

INDENG 115-001 (3 units)

Industrial and Commercial Data Systems
K. Goldberg

Design and implementation of databases, with an emphasis on industrial and commercial applications. Relational algebra, SQL, normalization. Students work in teams with local companies on a database design project. WWW design and queries.

MEDIAST 102 (4 units)

Effects of Mass Media
E. Timke

This course examines the often contentious history of communication theory concerning media effects. At issue among scholars working within different research traditions are core disagreements about what should be studied (institutions, texts, audiences, technologies), how they should be studied, and even what constitutes an “effect.” Course readings and lectures stress an understanding of different empirical and critical research traditions by focusing on the social, political, and historical contexts surrounding them, the research models and methods they employ, as well as the findings and conclusions they have reached. Course assignments and exams assess student understanding of course readings as well as the ability to apply mass media theory to new media texts.

MEDIAST 165-001 (4 units)

Internet and Culture
J. Jackson

This class uses the approaches of media studies and cultural studies to critically consider how historical and emerging new media technologies as well as the behaviors and forms of cultural production associated with them influence and are themselves influenced by our everyday practices and lived experiences. It focuses particularly on concerns of identity, community, access, citizenship, industry, and regulation as these relate to social networking, collective endeavor, and public speech.

MUSIC 109-001 (3 units)

Music Cognition: Mind Behind the Musical Ear
J. Bamberger

The goal of this class is to interrogate and make explicit the powerful musical intuitions that are at work as you make sense of the music all around you. What is the nature of the knowledge that is guiding these intuitions? How does this knowledge develop in ordinary and extraordinary ways? To approach these questions, small composition-like projects aided by a specially designed computer music environment will function as a workplace. You will explore, experiment, question, and reflect on how and what you know how to do as you generate the musical coherence that you seem simply to find.

RHETORIC 114-001 (4 units)

Rhetoric of New Media
Staff

This course examines a range of digital media practices including hypertext, interactive drama, videogames, literary interactive fiction, and socially constructed narratives in multi-user spaces. Through a mixture of readings, discussion, and project work, we will explore the theoretical positions, debates, and design issues arising from these different practices. Topics will include the rhetorical, ludic, theatrical, narrative political, and legal dimensions of digital media.

RHETORIC 158 (4 units)

Advanced Problems in the Rhetoric of Political Theory
D. Bates

Close study of selected works of modern political theory, including debates over the nature and interpretation of political theory and the role of the political theorist. Specific themes and readings vary from year to year.

SOCIOL 166 (4 units)

Society and Technology
L. Huang

This course studies the interaction between society and technologies in a comparative and multicultural perspective. Some topics covered include the relationship between technology and human society; technology, culture and values; technology in the new global economy; development and inequality; electronic democracy; how technology has transformed work and employment; and the challenges of technological progress and the role that society plays in addressing these challenges.

THEATER 26 (4 units)

Introduction to Performance Studies
A. De Kosnik

This course introduces the critical terms and practices of the contemporary study of performance. Several key terms and important genres of artistic and social performance will be engaged; the course will draw critical and disciplinary methods from anthropology and ethnography, from the theory of dance and theater, from literary and cultural theory. Critical and theoretical concepts will be used to analyze a wide range of live and recorded performances, as well as performance texts.

THEATER 119 (4 units)

Performance Theory: Modernism
S. Steen

An examination of a theoretical topic or perspective on performance, with specific attention to the interface between theoretical endeavor and dramatic, nondramatic, and nontheatrical modes of performance; may involve visiting artists. Topics vary from semester to semester.