Course Schedule and Location

Tuesdays, 2:00-4:50 pm, 5404 Posvar Hall

Lead Instructor/Instructor of Record for Spring 2020
  • Alison Langmead (History of Art and Architecture and School of Computing and Information)
Individual Units Taught by:
  • Michael Dietrich (History and Philosophy of Science)
  • Melanie Hughes (Sociology)
  • Mario Khreiche (Sawyer Seminar Post-Doctoral Fellow; History)
  • Michael Madison (Law)
  • Ruth Mostern (History)
  • Lara Putnam (History), John Markoff (Sociology), and Scott Weingart (CMU Libraries)
Course Description

This collaboratively taught seminar exposes students to interdisciplinary and evolving methods for discovery and knowledge construction in the humanities and social sciences. In particular, it focuses on how information flows in and out of socio-technical systems, the ways that researchers access, arrange, organize and describe information for use in their disciplinary context and how that shapes critical inquiry. Students will do hands-on work with data and methods and interrogate their affordances and limitations. Mini units in this course will be led by faculty from History, Political Science, Economics, English, Sociology, Information Science, History and Philosophy of Science, and History of Art and Architecture who are involved in the Mellon grant-funded Sawyer Seminar, “Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) From the Quantitative to the Digital Age,” which features invited speakers and supports a post-doctoral fellow in AY 2019-2020. Spring 2020 is the second of three years in which this course will be offered.