I’ve never made my syllabi from my Intensive Freshman Seminar course “Algorithms in Culture” course publicly available before now. Apparently the Intensive Freshman Seminar (IFS) program at Indiana University Bloomington was abruptly shuttered in 2024. While I have been gone from Indiana University almost three years, I’m still heartbroken to hear this. The IFS community at IU was passionate and deeply devoted to students. It was this amazing opportunity to give incoming first years a small, liberal arts college welcome to campus life before the rest of the student body returned.
I taught “Algorithms in Culture” for two years as part of IFS. Although 2020 is a lifetime ago considering the advances AI tooling has made since then, my syllabi are as relevant and applicable as ever. I wouldn’t change much.
Original course description
This course introduces students to a multidisciplinary approach for understanding algorithms and how they impact day-to-day life. Specific algorithms analyzed include the Google PageRank algorithm, the Google autocomplete algorithm, and Facebook’s advertising algorithms. We’ll read scholarly and news publications that analyze algorithms through cultural/media studies, Black feminism, information and library science, and psychology. Given my background as a librarian, the content will be considered through various types of literacies including metaliteracy, digital literacy, and algorithmic awareness.
No computer science background is necessary to take this course, in fact, we’ll start off by learning the fundamentals of what artificial intelligence is, a history of the internet, and the difference between hardware and software. Understanding the basic functions of computer science, and possessing the ability to explain foundational concepts of technology to a variety of audiences, is a key goal of this course. We’ll use this new knowledge to identify technochauvinism (the belief that technology is always the solution) in current events.
And we won’t just study the role algorithms play online, we’ll also contribute to the conversation. After learning how algorithms impact the creation and dissemination of content online, students will create and re-design online content and platforms to combat the inequalities algorithms magnify. Assignments include re-designing popular applications and websites using techniques from “humane technology” and creating content on Wikipedia to combat algorithmic oppression by making visible the knowledge of marginalized communities who are underrepresented online. To prepare for the Wikipedia writing assignment, students will complete assignments about how to conduct research using academic databases as well as how to quote, summarize, paraphrase, and cite their sources.
Some very specific questions that exemplify this course’s scope of interest:
- What was white supremacist Dylann Roof’s Google search history in the months leading up to his killing of eight black people at Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, SC?
- Why do most voice assistants have feminine names? (Siri, Alexis, Cortana)?
- Why is it impossible for algorithms that measure a criminal’s risk of reoffending to treat black and white defendants equally?
Primary texts
- Algorithms of Oppression – Safiya Noble
- Artificial Unintelligence – Meredith Broussard
