Generative AI & The Media
Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 generative AI has proliferated throughout society, capturing the imagination of the public with its potential to upend much of how people create and consume media and information. In this course we demystify this new technology, understand how it works, how to control it through prompting, and how to implement it in various use cases found in media production and communication. We also step back with a critical eye to ask questions of how generative AI changes the larger media system and raises ethical and governance issues around data, copyright, privacy, bias, and more.
Computational Communication
This research seminar offers an overview of the emerging field of computational communication including a sampling of methods for computational modeling, content analysis, network analysis, and simulation of communication-oriented data, as well as the application of critical approaches, and the empirical study of computational communication systems mediated by algorithms and AI. Through engagement with the latest scholarship in the field, the emphasis of the course is not on methodological mechanics, but rather on developing conceptual, strategic, and critical thinking to assess opportunities that computational methods and computational advances in society create for communication research. Here's the Syllabus
Algorithmic News Media
The increasing role that algorithms and automation are playing in the production of information is rapidly changing the ways in which the news media is authored, curated, disseminated, and consumed. This graduate seminar provides an overview of the latest developments in algorithmic news media on topics including journalistic data mining, automated content production, news bots, platform dissemination, and algorithmic accountability and transparency. Themes of value-sensitive design, labor, and sustainability are discussed with respect to how algorithms impact the public sphere. Here's the Syllabus
Computational Journalism
This course explores the conceptualization and application of computational and data-driven approaches to journalism practice. Students examine how computational techniques are changing journalistic data gathering, curation, sensemaking, presentation, dissemination, and analytics of content. Here's the Syllabus.
Storytelling with Data Visualization
This course covers the use of data visualization as a method to communicate news stories (narrative visualization) and as a way to explore and analyze data as a method to find new news stories (visual analytics) in a journalism context. Here's the Syllabus