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Technology, Media and Democracy: Addressing Challenges to an Informed Electorate +

Justin Hendrix | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2184 | Mon 7:00pm to 8:30pm in > Thur 6:30pm to 7:50pm in Meetings:14
applications, Elective, Graduate, In-Person, journalism, Spring 2025, Yes
Last updated: November 11, 2024

Across New York City’s universities, the Technology, Media and Democracy program will bring together journalism, design, and technical disciplines to understand the various threats to democracy, and attempt to address these challenges using technical and computational methods and techniques. Students have the opportunity to work with peers in other programs in journalism, engineering, media studies, design & technology at Columbia, Cornell Tech, CUNY and The New School to build ideas that advance an information ecosystem that nurtures democratic societies. The free press, journalism and the media are some of the most critical elements of our democracy, but have been increasingly under attack by political and market forces, and a social media landscape that has altered the way people interact and share information. These challenges include: dwindling resources and support for deep investigative journalism; legal, technical and even physical assaults of media organizations and journalists; challenges to credibility and reliability of information; and shifting business models and economics that threaten both local and national news organizations and coverage. This course will include various elements that will help frame the problem and build/prototype solutions that address a variety of issues.

https://techpolicy.press

Reading List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xoq92YRHNIVJV-74gwilZKVy-6yDTgAkfBDAll-oDO8/edit

Cabinets of Wonder +

Emily Conrad | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2470 | Wed 6:00pm to 8:30pm in 370 Jay St, Room 408 Meetings:14
4 Point, applications, design, Elective, exhibitdesign, exhibition, experience, Graduate, In-Person, museum, museums, Spring 2025, Yes
Last updated: November 11, 2024

If you were inventing a museum today, what would it look like? Who would be there? What would its main purpose be? What would the audience experience? The first museums were called Cabinets of Wonder. Usually, a viewer with a guide, often the collector, would open doors and drawers to see what was inside–amazing things from different parts of the world, different times. They were windows on the world to places the visitors would probably never be able to go; to see things they would never otherwise be able to see. And now there’s television, movies, the internet, and travel. Why do people go to museums now? Will they in the future? Today, most museums seek to educate and to include more and more diverse visitors than they used to. How do people learn in public spaces? How do we know that they do? How can they make use of the new interactive technologies to support the experience and not lose what’s special about them? The class is an exploration, observation, theory, and design class for you to imagine the future of museums and exhibits. Museum and exhibit visits are your primary assignments for the first half of the course—usually accompanied by a reading. You will also make some record of your visit (including a sketchbook, a diorama, reviews). There will be guest speakers from Museums and exhibit design firms, and several field trips. In the second half of the course, you begin to imagine how you might reinvent a museum and develop a full-scale presentation of your own Cabinet of Wonder.

About Emily Conrad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily/