This collection focuses on the investigation, application and discussion of ethics in computer science. Some of the topics touched upon are: data justice, algorithmic accountability, politics of digital representation.

Originally sourced from: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z0DqQeZ-Aeq6LmD17J5m8zeeIR6ywWnH-WO-jWtXE9M/edit#gid=0

Ethics in Computer Science

This class will explore how data visualization and analysis can be used to address issues of social justice. Our world is increasingly filled with data, and developing skills to make sense of it and communicate the results visually provide students with powerful tools to make their arguments more effective. We will employ a variety of techniques and perspectives drawing from the fields of statistics, cognitive science, perceptual psychology, coding, and information design. Looking at a series of case studies, we will discuss how to interpret quantitative analyses we encounter in the world as well as how to employ these skills for positive change in our world.

This course counts towards the Subject Requirement for the Journalism + Design Major. This course also counts as an elective for the Media Studies track of the Culture and Media major.

Data, Design and Social Justice

Common Syllabi

Algorithms have become central actors in today’s digital world. In areas as diverse as social media, journalism, education, healthcare, and policing, computing technologies increasingly mediate communication processes. This course will provide an introduction to the social and cultural forces shaping the construction, institutionalization, operation, and uses of algorithms. In so doing, we will explore how algorithms relate to political issues of modernization, power, and
inequality. Readings will range from social scientific analyses to media coverage of ongoing controversies relating to Big Data. Students will leave the course with a better appreciation of the broader challenges associated with researching, building, and using algorithms.

The Politics of Algorithms

In this course students learn about the background and current landscape of information governance and information ethics. In doing so we will examine the role of information and technology in shaping today’s society from various social, societal, and ethical perspectives, and will analyse relevant factors in technology, politics, and policy. Upon completion of the course, students will have both a broad and deep understanding of the need for and development of information governance and information ethics and will be able to discuss how these requirements are met by information institutions and research.

Information Governance und Informationsethik

Prototype Fund (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung)

This course is designed for anyone interested in producing music on computer using virtual instruments, samples and microphones. Regardless of style, this course provides an overview of the wide range of tools available to the modern music production.
This is an “all-in-one” course for (almost) everything related to music technology, the basics of digital audio, physic of sound, music recording, binaural audio, musical acoustics, signal flow, sound synthesis, music production, Game Audio, post-production and mixing.
Students will also study the elements of production design, composition, song form, and how to arrange, edit, build and shape a song using different D.A.Ws. In this course students will also learn the fundamentals of digital audio, studio and location recording, mixing, and MIDI sequencing using Logic Pro X, Pro Tools 12, Ableton Live, music production, and audio programming using Max. Students will also be briefly introduced to a wide- range of applications (and careers) in music technology.
This course is the Gateway to the Music Technology disciplinary area courses in the Music Program and it is mandatory for all Music majors. There are no pre- requisitesfor this course and anyone with a keen interest in recording and production, sequencing or programming is more than welcome to take it.

Music Technology Fundamentals

This immersive studio course in graphic design combines practice and reflection through a project- based approach to branding.
Logos are graphic marks or emblems used by commercial enterprises, organizations and individuals to aid and promote instant public recognition.
How are Logos doing today? How designers are coping with new emerging standards? How do we deal with a brand when a Favicon or screen buttons become more important than header paper? We will see how some of the most successful logos only seem to be set in stone, while in reality they constantly mutate and adapt. We also examine how and why certain logos in the last two decades have become metaphors for the worst outcomes of corporate cultures and the targets of anti- globalization activists everywhere. We investigate how and why in our  Age of Brands, logos ended in the spotlight for reasons opposite to the ones they were created for

Yes Logo

Fact may or may not be stranger than fiction, but invariably both exert strong influences in creating narrative. The course explores how documentary and fiction are combined throughout the history of film and in different cultures. We will examine the work of dozen filmmakers who have merged both formats creating singular hybrid films. Dramatic reconstructions, manipulated imagery or fictional interstitials are frequently incorporated into documentaries to elevate realism. Conversely, fiction occasionally crosses over into documentary to create a sense of authenticity or truthfulness. Lastly, the division is sometimes completely eradicated making it difficult to distinguish the reality from the imaginary. Over the course of the  emester, students will create their own docu-fiction short films. They will bring together fiction and non-fiction story elements reflecting on how each form complements the other.

Docu-Fiction Cinema

From the beginning of the 8th to the beginning of the 17th century, Islam played a crucial role in the history of the Iberian peninsula.  Today this period is often portrayed as one of inter-religious harmony, while al-Andalus is simultaneously mourned in contemporary Islamist discourse as a lost paradise. In this course we will investigate the rich and complex history of al-Andalus, focusing on the changing relationships between Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities.

Paradise Lost: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in al-Andalus

This seminar aims to, on the one hand, introduce students to the main theoretical and epistemological trends in the study of the Arab Crossroads region, and on the other, to offer practical examples of the types of methodologies used by scholars working in the humanities and the qualitative social sciences.  The course begins with a critical engagement with the strengths and weaknesses of area studies, and the politics of producing knowledge on a region that is of such global economic and political importance. It then turns to specific areas of research that have attracted considerable attention in the fields of history, anthropology, literature, and politics, before exploring the various methodological approaches used by practitioners of these fields.  The course assignments include response papers, short essays on specific debates in relevant scholarship, transcribed interviews, and culminate in an extended research proposal for a capstone project.

Problems and Methods in Arab Crossroads Studies

Law in Entrepreneurship seeks to prepare students for the interconnectedness of global startup organizations and the internal and external legal environments. The course will provide an introduction to entrepreneurial strategy, focusing on law as a basic framework. The course will provide students with the fundamental and practical knowledge of legal competitiveness for enterprises and will introduce students to a broad range of legal issues encountered by founders and business executives and will also help students develop a set of analytical perspectives for making judgments when such issues arise.
Students will act in the roles of key decision-makers or their advisors and solve problems related to the development of the competitive advantage of the enterprise in a given market. While the chief concern of those who create and manage businesses of any kind is often in the mechanics of the business itself, law is an integral part of running the machine that is an enterprise. It is law that sets certain standards for the setting in which a business operates and provides the framework to codify the business’ own standards. Thus, insight into the law becomes a significant tool in the business leader’s repertoire. It allows you to be mindful of the business’ limits and knowledgeable about in what manner the business can be strengthened.

Law in Entrepreneurship

At the western end of the Mediterranean, the religious, political, and economic histories of North Africa and Iberia have always been intertwined.  This was especially the case during the eight centuries from 711-1492 when various parts of the Iberian peninsula were ruled over by Muslims.  In this course we will look both at how what are today Morocco and Spain were connected in this period in both history and imagination, and at how the Spanish colonial presence in Morocco in the 20th century played a important role in the Spanish civil war.  The course will include an extended trip through Morocco and Spain.

Shared Worlds: The Interwoven Pasts of Spain and Morocco

An intensive, project- driven course designed to develop skills in sound synthesis techniques and procedural music, with a focus on their specific application in composition, sound design, New Instruments of Musical Expression, and games.
The course will consist in extensive exploration of analog modular synthesis, Max, and SuperCollider, in recreating algorithms used by synthesis and computer music pioneers such as Xenakis, Chowning, and Risset as well as new talents in electronic music such as Agostino Di Scipio, Alessandro Cortini or Richard Devine. Previous knowledge of working with Max and/or SuperCollider is required for this course or students may have to take a complementary lab in order to be able to follow the class. By the end of the semester, students will have built a small portfolio of musical works employing the techniques learned during the semester.

Music, Electricity & Computation

Art can be defined as a coalescing of skills and imagination into creative expression. We often experience the results of this process through our senses and then reflect on the presented work. However, through the use of readily accessible open source technologies, such as sensors and computer vision, it is possible to create interactive art that leverages the full potential of the human body and continuously integrates a person into the artistic expression of the work. Directly injecting people-sensing into an art work creates a unique feedback loop, or dialogue-like relationship, where a person does something and a computer senses what the person did and reacts; the person experiences this reaction through their senses and then reacts themselves, and so on and so forth.
This course will examine this feedback loop of sensing people and stimulating people's senses, all within the framework of artistic expression. Students will create interactive installations and performances where the human body is the central component of the art work. Since the human body is naturally dynamic and unpredictable, students will be challenged to develop algorithms that manage potentially chaotic data as well as design systems that help guide people’s physical interactions and input. Students will study past and present works in the field to help inform and direct their own creative decisions. 

Sensors, Body and Motion

How does the dramatis bring alive an historucal poch to enliven a work for stage, film or television/ What elements are essential to create a compelling narrative? Should the characters be actual people or fictionalized composites? And what ethical issues are raised in such decision-making?
In this course students will embark on a journey to bring alive stories that hold personal significance. Whether the tales are connection to family, culture, gender or 'race' memory, there are certain steps that may enhance the creation and development of dramatic work based on historical information. Students will have the opportunity to detail their personal process in both creative and critical terms.

Dramatizing History

As the World Wide Web continues to grow and permeate our everyday lives, an ever-increasing amount of data and digital services are accessible to us through public web APIs - Application Programming Interfaces. Common to many web sites, including YouTube, Twitter, Google Maps, Wikipedia and more, web APIs offer a means to programmatically request and re-purpose endless troves of information. But how exactly do we access these datasets and services? How can we write code to transfer, store, and display this content on our own web sites? And how might we use these available resources to design unique, creative, and compelling web experiences of our own.

This class is about creating interactive single-page web applications that leverage public data and digital services from a wide range of existing web products. The overall goal of the class will be for each student to have 3 well-designed functional single-page web applications by end of semester. Subscribing to a project-oriented approach, a majority of class time will be spent reviewing and writing code, primarily Javascript, for client-side (front-end) web development. We will use a number of Javascript libraries, including jQuery, Underscore, D3,p5, Three and more, to help build a diversity of web experiences. Where server-side (back-end) development is required, we will use the Node-Express framework. Students should have some programming experience as well as an exposure to basic client-side web development, specifically HTML and CSS. Experience with Javascript is a plus.

Mashups: Creating with Web APIs

Painting goes back over 40,000 years, as evidenced by the El Castillo Caves of Spain. No other art form has an accessible history this extensive, which is why the choice to make paintings is particularly challenging. And yet, this is also the reason we continue to do it.  Because, when you reach out with that brush, you are metaphorically touching all painting and thus attempting to communicate with all humanity past and present. Painting has provided us an impression of people from the Neanderthal to the Renaissance to Modern and Post-Modern times. This history serves as evidence of our humanity. Because of its plasticity, painting continues to be the most economic means for expression. The intelligence of painting comes from its 2-dimensional character. It requires the invention of flat abstract shapes to communicate complex, multi-dimensional ideas. For the individual painter the painting process takes place in time. It is an intimate theater of action. However, in public, paintings are experienced in their simultaneity. The paradox; painting is a process that takes place in time but is experienced without time. When we connect with a painting our empathy with the artist collapses all of time into the present. There is no history.

Projects in Painting 1: private theater, public meaning

How have anthropologists encountered, written about, and produced the “Arab world” over the past century? Beginning with early Western travelers’ imaginaries of Arabia and ending with a reflection on the role of anthropology (in the Muslim world, and more globally) today, this course provides an introduction to the anthropological project and to the everyday realities of people living in the region. Through ethnographic texts, films, and fieldwork, we will explore such topics as Orientalism and its legacy; constructs of youth, gender, family, and tribe; poetry and mediation; generational and social change; oil, development, and globalization; water, resource scarcity, and environmental governance; transnational labor, migration, and diaspora; the Islamic Revival and religious conversion; faith, medicine, and bioethics; displacement and dispossession; refugees and human rights; the Arab uprisings and their aftermath; and ethnographic representations and responsibilities.

Anthropology and the Arab World

Unmasking the Actor is a theatre performance course that provides students with a series of tools to allow them not to “play themselves” but to “play using themselves”.
The course is based on the performance philosophy and practice of Jacques Lecoq, where an investigation of the mechanics of the body is applied to dramatic creation using different acting traditions. Students analyze their body and movement with four different kinds of mask: Neutral mask, Larval mask, Commedia dell’Arte mask and the smallest mask in the world, the red nose of the clown. In this process, the disguise drives the students to discover emotions, movements and thoughts far from their habitual and comfortable modes of performance; by gradually removing the disguise, they reach self-awareness and learn how to enjoy their presence on stage. Combining the methodologies of Jacques Lecoq, Carlo Boso and Philippe Gaulier the course is a careful study of stage performance and its effects.

Unmasking the Actor: Covering the face to liberate the body

Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms affect many aspects of our lives whether we realize it or not: banking transactions, healthcare treatments and diagnoses, entertainment recommendations, smart car functionality, customer service agents, financial trading… the list goes on and on. The power of these algorithms lies in their ability to leverage computers to "study" and "learn". Instead of programming a computer to do a specific task, we program the computer to train itself how to do any number of tasks. As artists, how can we harness the power of these algorithms and apply them towards creative endeavors? This class will explore that basic question. Through a combination of high level applied machine learning techniques, speculative design of artificial intelligence, and some basic understanding of how these algorithms work at a low level, students will explore this rich new field. With their machine counterparts, they will create images, sounds, text, intuitive interactions, chatbots, and more.

A.rt I.ntel: Machine Learning for Artists

An advanced seminar that involves the careful study of some particular movement, philosopher, or issue in the history of philosophy. Examples: Aristotle, Ibn Sina, Kant, German Idealism, theories of causation in Indian philosophy, vice in the global history of philosophy.
The topic of this seminar is the philosophy of David Hume [1711- 1776], often considered to be the greatest philosopher to have written in English. Specific sub- topics for examination and discussion include Hume’s treatments of mental representation, space and time, inductive reasoning, belief, probability, causation, knowledge of the external world, epistemic normativity, free will, motivation, moral epistemology, moral normativity, natural virtues, justice, politics, and economics. Recurring themes will include the nature and consequences of his empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism and the systematic interrelations among the various elements of his philosophy. Emphasis will be placed throughout on Hume's significance for issues in contemporary philosophy.

Topics in the History of Philosophy

Theater in Germany serves as a hotly debated public venue for working through major social and political issues and critiquing the status quo. This tradition begins in the late 18th century with the radical dramatists of the Sturm und Drang period and continues up to the present. This class centers on 20th-century German theater and on the theories, movements, and dramas that shaped it against the backdrop of a tumultuous century. After studying the foundational contributions of Schiller and Wagner, we examine the modernist theater of Max Reinhardt and the left-wing theater of the Weimar Republic, especially Piscator's political theater and Brecht's epic theater. In subsequent weeks, we look at theater during the Third Reich, postwar theater trends in East and West Germany, and developments in reunified Germany starting in the 1990s. Finally, we explore current debates surrounding how contemporary Berlin theaters are addressing racialization and structural inequality. Our weekly meetings center on history, and theory, and usually include a dramatic text.

German Theater of the 20th Century
History & Practice

Ce cours est un cours magistrale d'introduction aux avants-gardes théâtrales, depuis le début du vingtième siècle jusqu'à l'après-guerre (1950-1970).

Avant-Gardes Historiques

Nouvelles orientations politiques sur les scènes occidentales des années 1950 à aujourd’hui

Dans la partie de ce cours consacrée au théâtre, nous nous intéresserons aux esthétiques théâtrales à partir de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, et en particulier aux nouvelles formes nées de la volonté de produire un théâtre politique ou engagé, en prise avec le réel et l’actualité.

Histoire et esthétique du théâtre et de la danse

Ce cours magistral concerne la notion de spectacle, telle qu'elle est déployée à travers l'histoire occidentale, et examinée à travers un prisme dramaturgique, politique et philosophique.

La notion de spectacle

Introduction à l’histoire et aux esthétiques du théâtre arabe

Ce cours a vocation à introduire auprès des étudiant·e·s des éléments historiques et esthétiques pour aborder la création théâtrale dans les pays arabes (particulièrement au Maghreb et au Moyen-Orient), en particulier depuis le 19ème siècle et jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Si l’historiographie a souvent étudié́ le théâtre arabe comme une émanation du modèle européen importé à l’époque coloniale, ce cours, en abordant aussi une perspective critique, s’attachera à présenter les spécificités de ce théâtre, en s’appuyant sur des éléments de contexte historique, des textes dramatiques et théoriques ainsi que des documents audio-visuels. 

Perspectives internationales

Dramaturgie des classiques

Qu’est-ce qu’une œuvre « classique » ? Comment l’analyser et comment la monter aujourd’hui ? Ce TD sera consacré à l’approche dramaturgique des « classiques ». À partir d’un corpus d’œuvres du répertoire du théâtre européen, ce cours est pensé comme une initiation à la dramaturgie et à l’analyse dramaturgique. S’attachant à des textes de répertoire considérés dans leur contexte historique, politique et esthétique, il s’agira de mobiliser des outils permettant d’aborder une œuvre théâtrale dans l’optique de son passage à la scène.

Analyse d'oeuvres (théâtre)

Ce cours est une introduction à l'analyse d'oeuvres dramaturgiques.

Histoire du théâtre I : analyse dramaturgique

Ce TD a pour objectif d’introduire auprès des étudiant·es le théâtre (texte, mise en scène, réception)  en s’attachant particulièrement au lien qu’entretiennent les œuvres avec les problématiques sociales et politiques de la société contemporaine.

Arts du spectacles et société

Réécritures, Adaptations et Mises en scène de la tragédie grecque en contextes extra-européens

Ce cours a pour objectif d’étudier les modalités esthétiques et les enjeux politiques des adaptations et mises en scène de tragédies grecques antiques dans des contextes extra-européens. Alors que le théâtre grec est revendiqué par les Européen·nes comme leur héritage, comment ce théâtre a-t-il été qualifié de modèle et exporté comme un outil de domination culturelle dans des contextes extra-européens ? À l’inverse, comment ces textes et mythes antiques ont pu être travaillés, appropriés, revendiqués dans des contextes marqués par l’histoire coloniale ? Après une présentation problématisée des enjeux, les étudiant·es seront invité·es à travailler sur des exemples précis de textes et de spectacles issus des corpus sud- et nord-américains, moyen-orientaux et asiatiques.  


Analyse d'œuvres internationales

This course is an introduction to problems of methods in the field of theater studies, in the context of a conducting a masters thesis.

Méthodologie

This course focuses on the role of archives in the research process of theater studies, in the context of writing a masters thesis.

Archives du spectacle vivant

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Survival of the best fit

Syllabus

While our relationships between ourselves, our environment, and other people are inherently political, computer technologies and technology companies consistently claim to remain “neutral”. This course will assume the opposite —software is political—, and focus on how software applications share commonalities with political systems, how they affect their users as political actors and how we can build alternatives or improvements to those systems.

This course is aimed at deconstructing the design and implementation of software as a political medium, such as Facebook’s timeline algorithm, city officials’ use of computer simulations to orchestrate urban life, blockchain-backed proof of ownership and algorithmic criminal assessment. Along with an introduction to political theory and media studies, coupled with an exploration of the underlying political impacts of those systems, students will work on several hands-on projects to offer functioning alternatives to those systems. To that end, this course will include several workshops in JavaScript, Python and Unity.

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