Special Topics & New Courses

Spring 2023

IMT 589 A: Cloud Computing

Instructor: Fawad Khan
4 credits; standard grading

This course is going to introduce the concept of Cloud Computing and how it is transforming and evolving the IT industry and the developer ecosystem, as we move away from on-premises to Cloud-based infrastructure and app development scenarios. Discussion of Cloud services models including SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. Review of Cloud services usage and migration scenarios considering business goals and objectives along with developing a Costs/Benefits Analysis model. Understand primary business consideration for migrating to cloud services including cost, security, compliance, fault tolerance, backup, disaster recovery and monitoring. Learn about the most popular and consumed services including deploying, managing and maintaining a VM network infrastructure, developing Cloud-based App solutions, Containers, Serverless and Identity & authentication. Discussion of on the horizon key Cloud services in the new digital transformation age including Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and IoT.

IMT 589 B: Problematic Information

Instructor: Emma Spiro
4 credits; standard grading

Addressing the problem of misinformation is among the most pressing challenges of our time — and times to come. Recent decades have seen a profound shift in the ways people, groups and organizations produce and consume information and participate in public discourse. This new paradigm for human interaction and information sharing creates space for diverse voices and enhances collective action in positive ways. Yet these information environments have also opened the door to misinformation, disinformation and other forms of networked manipulation, which function not only to mislead and create divisions, but also to diminish trust in democratic institutions such as science and journalism.

This graduate seminar will introduce students to the lexicon of problematic information, tracing the historical roots and context of this phenomena and exploring the new realm of online information operations employed in today’s socio-technical infrastructure.

IMT 589 C: Portable Information Structures

Instructor: TBD
4 credits; standard grading

Introduces the concepts and methods used to analyze, store, manage, and present information and navigation. Equal weight given to understanding structures and implementing them. Topics include information analysis and organizational methods as well as metadata concepts and application.

IMT 589 D: Advanced Product Management (PPMC)

Instructor: Terri Carol Eccles
4 credits; standard grading
Online Synchronous
Prerequisite: IMT 587 - To verify you have fulfilled the IMT 587 prerequisite please complete this form.

This course provides a deep dive of skills, practices, and frameworks foundational to a career in product management (with a focus on product strategy in diverse markets and organizations). Emphasizes strategic storytelling, leadership of teams and the development of proposals and roadmaps grounded in customer needs, business objectives, and technical possibilities.

IMT 598 B: Advanced User Experience Design

Instructor: TBD
3 credits; standard grading

IMT 598 D: Blockchain

Instructor: Jochen Scholl
3 credits; standard

Blockchain technology has once been labeled a game changer in information management. Since then it has gradually become integral to and important in developing organizations' information management strategies and architecture options. Blockchain is one particular instantiation of the group of so-called Distributed Ledger Technologies (or, DLTs), which provide another unique way in how companies and individuals can share important data. Blockchain/DLT has become known and visible to a broader audience as the underlying technology that enables cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Meanwhile Blockchain and other DLTs have expanded into broader uses and forms of data storing and tracking in areas such as smart contracts, deed and property registries, intellectual property, music, aircraft assemblies, medical records, agriculture and more. This course is non-technical in nature and not designed to cover the technical nuts and bolts of DLTs and Blockchain; however, it provides a general understanding of how DLT/Blockchain works, how its various uses have been evolving, and what its current and future challenges are, all of which also includes regulatory and governance aspects. Understanding Blockchain/DLT and its uses is an asset to and provides career opportunities for information professionals of all designations.

IMT 598 E: Advanced Leadership Development Seminar

Instructor: Sean McGann
3 credits; credit/no credit grading
Prerequisites: IMT 580 and Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) with at least 5 reviewers.
Application required - To be considered for this unique special topics course, students must complete an application form due February 2, 2023.

In this seminar, we seek to deepen the skill development started in IMT 580, through continuation of The Leadership Challenge and the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI). As a class, we will dive more deeply into each of the 5 practices, through discussion and reflection exercises. Through individual coaching sessions, the instructor will examine each student’s LPI, and discuss strengths and areas for improvement, working with them to better understand the results and coaching them on how to develop and implement strategies for long-term leadership development. Students will also leverage peer groups to share, reflect and advise each other on LPI results and leadership development lessons learned.

INFO 498 A: Afrofuturism and Information Technology

Instructor: Temi Odumosu
3 credits; Standard grading

This course provides an introduction to the evolution of Afrofuturism as global multidisciplinary movement, with mainstream visibility in the arts and culture. In particular it explores how Afrofuturist ideas, images, and methodologies contribute to an expanded understanding of information technology. The course centralizes Afro-Diasporic epistemologies as critical for thinking through issues in the informatics field.

INFO 498 C: Internet Dating

Instructor: Wes Eli King
4 credits, standard grading

This course will explore the role of internet dating in structuring romantic and sexual relationships in a global context. Lines of inquiry in this course will focus on how particular forms of internet dating, ranging from those based on self-reports, psychological profiling, niche markets, location, or DNA testing, may inform, mobilize and challenge social and political norms, expectations and practices. Using the walkthrough method, students will “walk through” a selected internet dating platform and offer a critical analysis of the interface, business model, and environment of expected use including design recommendations for creating new or revising existing internet dating sites.

INFO 498 D: Exploring Information Science through BTS & Kpop

Instructor: Jin Ha Lee
3 credits; standard grading
Course may be counted toward human-computer interaction (HCI) option

What can BTS teach you about information science? Explore different aspects of information science such as classification, social media, misinformation and disinformation, transmedia storytelling, participatory media, fan wars and fandom gatekeeping through Kpop, in particular, the case of BTS. Design and conduct a research study investigating an information science problem in the domain of popular culture media.

INFO 498 E: Introduction to Cultural Analytics: Data, Computation, and Culture

Instructor: Melanie Walsh
Offered jointly with TXTDS 413 A
4 credits; standard grading

This course will prepare students to analyze cultural data — such as books, songs, Reddit posts, and film screenplays — with computational methods. After a basic introduction to the programming language Python, we will cover topics including web scraping, data analysis, text mining, and network analysis. We will survey and discuss how these computational tools are applied in humanistic and social scientific research. We will also reflect on the specific problems, challenges, and ethical dilemmas posed by the computational study of culture. This course is designed for students with humanistic and/or social scientific interests who have no previous programming background.

INFO 498 F: Indigenous Ways of Knowing in the Digital World

Instructor: Sandy Littletree
4 credits; standard grading

Indigenous people are using a variety of digital tools such as video games, virtual reality, language apps, and digital heritage sites to maintain their relationships to place, language, history, and culture. In this course, we will explore the respectful use and development of these tools with an emphasis on Native North American Indigenous approaches to knowledge. By the end of this course, students will understand how relationality can inform thoughtful, respectful and appropriate uses of information technology that is designed by and for Indigenous people.

INFO 498 G: Understanding Asian Students’ Experiences in Technology Education

Instructor: Mina Tari
4 credits; standard grading

Asian students are often perceived as overrepresented in technology education and industry in the United States. However, we will break down this perception by understanding how intersecting identities, historical context of Asian immigration, and the model minority myth create false narratives around Asians' participation in technology fields. In this class we will discuss the intersection of gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and nationality in how these factors impact Asian students' experiences in higher education, especially in technology courses. We will introduce the lens of feminism, critical race theory, intersectionality, decolonialism, and Indigenous theory. Additionally, we will discuss the lack of attention on international Asian populations, as well as key differences in Asian and Pacific Islander experiences, bringing in the context of colonialism and Indigenous identity.

INFO 498 H: Games and Information

Instructor: Travis Windleharth
3 credits, standard grading

This course explores games from the perspective of information. As media artifacts, both digital and non-digital games are increasingly utilized not just for entertainment and expression, but also for learning, training, persuasion, data collection, therapy, and community building. This course examines games and information from four perspectives including i) the form and elements of games as designed interactive media artifacts, ii) existing and emerging game functions across multiple domains of human activity, iii) learning and rhetoric in games, and iv) games as information objects. Students will build a solid understanding of the informational aspects of games, the breadth of their use, their potential and limitations, and their place in modern society as an increasingly important media format. In addition to course readings, interactive lectures, and guest speakers, students will engage in a range of in-class gameplay to actively experience concepts.

INFO 498 I: Sports Analytics

Instructor: TBD
5 credits, standard grading

INSC 598 A: Indigenous Research Methods

Instructor: Clarita Lefthand-Begay
3 credits, standard grading

Historically research conducted on Indigenous peoples in North America and around the globe was done using biased, dehumanizing and unethical approaches. In the 21st Century, it is now our responsibility to reject those egregious approaches in order to repair research relationships with Sovereign Tribal Nations and their citizens. When done with respect, reciprocity, relationality and rigor, research outcomes have the potential to inform decision-making and policy among tribal leaders and their counterparts in federal agencies and tribal organizations. In this advanced graduate class, students will engage with foundational reading at the intersection of Indigenous studies, information sciences, environmental and wellbeing. Students will lead class discussions, present published works by prominent scholars, and engage with tribal leaders and citizens to gain a broader understanding about the implications of research within these societies.

INSC 598 C: Social Computing

Tanu Mitra
3 credits; standard grading

Social computing is a research area that is at the intersection of computational systems and social behavior. This project based course is geared toward developing a broad understanding of today’s online social systems. Team-based projects will focus on studying real-world challenges and opportunities in current social media platforms by analyzing the vast amounts of data people leave behind in these platforms, applying quantitative methodologies to investigate and model this data, and building social tools that can augment current social computing systems. Aligned with best industry practices, students will be expected to work in a fast-paced, collaborative environment and to demonstrate independence and leadership. In addition, students are expected to gain experience in reading technical papers, and giving good public presentations.

LIS 598 A: Indigenous Art is Indigenous Knowledge

Instructor: Miranda Belarde-Lewis
4 credits; standard grading
Online asynchronous

This course examines the relationship between Indigenous art and Indigenous Knowledge (IK) with an emphasis on tribal groups in North America. How have Native artists documented oral history, cosmologies, maps and plant knowledge through art? How are the customary forms of art evolving to keep up with the needs of contemporary Native peoples? This course draws on theory from Indigenous Studies, Information Science, Art History and, visual and museum studies to unpack the intention, purpose and interpretation of Indigenous art and artifacts.

In this course, students will be asked to explore: the concept of Indigenous Knowledge; the role of the arts in Native communities in ancient times and in the present-day; the complicated colonial legacy between museums and Indigenous peoples; and, the push by Native peoples to be consulted with and their views respected about objects from their home communities that reside in museum collections. In addition to engaging with research, theory and the practices related to the study of Native art, Native history and IK, students will be asked to complete an in-depth research project about a particular group of art works, a community-based effort to maintain the transfer of IK through Indigenous art, or, the presentation and incorporation of IK through a museum exhibit.

LIS 598 E: Information Architecture

Instructor: Mike Doane
5 credits; standard grading

This course Introduces concepts and methods of front- and back-end information architecture. Includes hands-on teamwork using the latest software tools for data and content modeling, taxonomy development, controlled vocabulary creation and SEO considerations. The course also covers traditional user experience design topics such as inclusive design processes, design patterns, navigation, workflow, labeling, diverse user research and user flow diagrams. Teams produce a series of project deliverables suitable for building a professional portfolio.

LIS 598 F: Future of Research Libraries

Instructor: Carole Palmer
3 credits; standard grading
Online asynchronous

This course will examine top trends in research libraries, covering short- and long-term trends that have been identified and predicted. Key trends will be examined and assessed, with particular attention to how libraries and the profession are responding and how they need to evolve in the future. A key tenet underlying the course: “Academic and research libraries are not just a vital part of scholarship, but also advance knowledge and society as a whole. They play an important role as curators and purveyors of high-quality research, supported by innovative infrastructure. (Annual Horizon Report: 2017 Library Edition.)

Overarching themes will include market forces, technology adoption, and the socio-cultural environment.

Winter 2023

IMT 589 A: Advanced Product Management (PPMC)

Instructor: Terri Carol Eccles
4 credits; standard grading
Prerequisite: IMT 587

IMT 598 A: Understanding and Building Low-Code and No-Code Business Solutions for Your Organization

Instructor: Fawad Khan
3 credits; standard grading

According to Gartner, 65% of overall application development will be using No-code/Low-code in organizations by 2024. Start with understanding the basics of digital transformation, Cloud computing, and how they are evolving the development and business landscape. Learn about the next revolution in cloud computing development using the low-code and no-code development platforms. Using these platforms, both business and IT users can create business applications with minimal development experience. Discover and learn how you, as a regular IT or business user, can solve some of the common and complex business problems using these platforms. Understand the power of data and how to build business solutions quickly by integrating data from various sources, incorporating business flows, building internal/external Websites, and including virtual chatbots in your applications.

INFO 498 A: Learning Sciences for Informatics

Instructor: Caroline Pitt
3 credits; standard grading

Over the past few years, online and hybrid learning have been an essential part of our educational experiences. Additionally, everyone from tech giants to rural school districts to global nonprofits has been discussing, debating, designing, and envisioning the role of technology in learning, in current and future iterations. But, before we get to creating those technologies, we should (and need to) understand the theoretical and practical perspectives on learning and how to combine those theories and concepts into functional lessons, curricula, and, eventually, applications and systems. In this course, we’ll explore the relationship between education and technology, drawing on learning sciences theories and concepts; education history; and current events, research, and experiences. The course will touch on a variety of topics, such as computer-supported collaborative learning, sociotechnical ecosystems, the process of designing technologies for learning, learning analytics, educational games, and learning management tools. Students will have the opportunity to investigate the foundations of specific learning technologies, critique and improve current systems, and propose future designs.

INFO 498 B: Team Capstone Project and INFO 499 A: Independent Study

Instructor: Frank Martinez
4 credits/course; standard grading
Both courses must be taken concurrently
Prerequisites: INFO 300, INFO 350, & INFO 370

These two courses create an opportunity for students to participate in an intensive project-based course centered in the healthcare domain that will satisfy the Capstone graduation requirement. Eligible students must enroll in 8 credits in Winter 2023, and should expect to spend an average of 25 hours a week on the project.

Student teams will work to research, document, and visualize data about Long COVID in collaboration with Dr. Leo Morales and the UW Latino Center for Health (https://latinocenterforhealth.org).

Students will be organized into teams to work on deliverables and present their progress each week. Breakout teams will include research, data science, and other focus areas. The final deliverable will be an open source repository that includes a dataset and documentation on how to use the dataset for future research.

There are no prerequisites for programming languages or frameworks, but students should be familiar with the tools used to create, shape, collaborate, and explore with data.

To be eligible to enroll in this project, students must have successfully completed the following prerequisites by the end of Autumn 2022:

INFO 300 Research Methods
INFO 350 Information Ethics and Policy
INFO 370 Core Methods in Data Science

In addition, enrollment preference will be given to students who have also completed INFO 478 Population Health Informatics, and those who have senior standing.

If you meet the above criteria and would like to enroll in this exciting course, please request an Add Code and registration information by completing the following form: https://forms.office.com/r/YhsJ4fqWki.

INFO 498 D: Tagging as a Social and Technical Information System

Instructor: Chris Holstrom
4 credits; standard grading

Tags and hashtags have proliferated across the web, marking photos and articles, helping content go viral, and functioning as shorthand slogans for social movements. These ubiquitous snippets of metadata are an essential aspect of the social web and the foundation of many modern, lightweight knowledge organization systems. This course approaches tagging as both a social system and a technical system. It investigates the promise and criticisms of social tagging on the web; places tagging in context with other subject indexing, retrieval, and navigation technologies; evaluates the effectiveness of tags in information retrieval; and considers the ethical impact of tagging on information systems and society.

INFO 498 E: Applied Product Design

Instructor: Brian Fling
5 credits; standard grading

In this hands-on course, you’ll develop and hone your craft by working in a virtual product design studio. You will learn the complete lifecycle of product design – solving real design challenges from start to finish for real products from Apple, Amazon, Instagram, Netflix, Airbnb and others. This includes ideation, customer research, testing, rapid prototyping, UX and UI design, as well pitching your ideas and receiving design critique.

You will learn by doing real design work. You'll work iteratively within our design studio to develop your product design and your craft. You'll try out new ideas, develop new design methods and make mistakes, getting mentorship from senior designers along the way.

Regardless of your previous experience in product design, by the end of the course you will have a mastery of tools like Figma, a deep understanding of the role and expectations of a modern product designer, and taste of what life will be like as a practicing product designer

INFO 498 F: Open Science Data

Instructor: Megan Finn
3 credits; standard grading
Online Synchronous

A data-driven society is built on generating, connecting, and sharing trustworthy collections of data. But the processes of accessing data are subject to conflicting political, institutional, and economic forces. Over the last twenty years, American science agencies have increasingly required that scientists make their research data public. Commentators have hypothesized that the growing availability of data would lead to a data revolution and fields such as informatics, data science, library science, and information science have arisen and responded to the increased attention to data. At the same time, other researchers have explained that for the data revolution to be realized, an enormous amount of work and resources are needed to enable the production and preservation of data. Additionally, scientific data reuse has proven to be a much thornier problem than simply making data accessible. This course will address open science data from a social scientific and humanistic perspective. Through research, writing, lectures, conversation, and reading, students will explore the policies, on the ground practices, and datasets that constitute the world of scientific data management and open science data. We will individually and collaboratively explore biographies of datasets, histories of science data policies, and the data repositories and cyberinfrastructures powering the data revolution to understand the past, present, and future of scientific data.

INFO 498 G: Digital Humanities

Instructor: Sarah L. Ketchley
3 credits; standard grading
Online Synchronous
Course may be counted toward the Date Science (DS) option

This course will explore current Digital Humanities methods, tools, topics and debates. Students will have a unique and exciting opportunity to investigate the hands-on application of digital tools to primary source material, using computational methodologies to answer a range of humanities research questions.

INSC 578 A Research Seminar: AI Bias Feedback Cycle

Instructor: Aylin Caliskan
2 credits; Credit/No-credit grading

This is a directed research group (DRG) on the artificial intelligence (AI) bias cycle to study the implicit social cognition of machines and human-AI interaction (HAI). We have open research questions on how implicit AI associations and biases propagate from society to models and their decisions. How do biased AI outputs affect humans-in-the-loop in critical decision-making processes as humans interact with AI? How does implicit AI bias impact individuals, society, and equity at scale? What are the ethical implications? How do the compounding effects of these mechanisms shape society and the future generations of AI models? Finally, how do we develop strategies to mitigate bias?

Social cognition of machines: We will research why AI automatically learns implicit bias from sociocultural data by developing statistical methods and algorithms, collecting data, training models in controlled experimental settings, and analyzing machine learning models. We will focus on unsupervised and self-supervised AI models such as static word embeddings and dynamic word embeddings of language models (English or multilingual), multi-modal language-vision models, or speech models. Biases of interest are on age, all representations of gender, body-weight, disability, immigration, religion, intersectionality, language, nationality, race or ethnicity, political orientation, sexual orientation, and social class. I’d love to hear about any other concept or social group associations you might be interested in studying.

Human-AI interaction: The DRG aims to advance our understanding of the processes underpinning AI’s biased information acquisition, propagation and evolution of bias and associations, and AI’s impact on individuals, society, and AI. Approaches to HAI research might involve domain-based bias analyses, human subjects, humans-in-the-loop, and the replication of real-world AI applications.

INSC 578 B Research Seminar: Indigenous Health Equity

Instructor: Clarita Lefthand-Begay
2 credits; Credit/No-credit grading

INSC 578 C Research Seminar: Misinformation Narratives Online

Instructor: Emma Spiro
2 credits; Credit/No-credit grading

In this course, students will have the opportunity to engage, hands-on, in multiple aspects of the research process, including the development of research questions, review of the literature, data cleaning and analysis, and the writing of a scholarly paper. Research will focus on understanding how misinformation and disinformation flows through modern information systems and how this information translates into beliefs, actions and values. Students will work with data created at the Center for an Informed Public. The goal of the class is to produce a scholarly paper draft that can be shared broadly within this growing research community and on students’ resumes and recommendation letters.

INSC 599 - Independent Study in Information Science: Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Access, and Sovereignty (IDEAS)

Instructor: Wanda Pratt
Credit: 1-2 credits

This independent study provides a supportive group for iSchool PhD students to meet regularly (online) and work together on student-led IDEAS work in the iSchool while earning 1-2 course credits each quarter. Class meetings will be held every other week throughout the quarter and will primarily focus on building community and space for this work, seeking guidance from mentors and peers, and reporting progress on projects. Students are welcome to bring their own project ideas or work on existing projects. In the first class of each quarter, all project options and ideas will be discussed. iPhDs will then be required to choose their project(s) and submit their goals and plans for the quarter before the second class. Everyone will submit the same INSC 599 Proposal template.

LIS 598 C: Public Libraries, Literacy and Information Behavior in the Arab World

Instructor: Karen Fisher
3 credits; Standard grading
Online asynchronous

Public libraries are considered a Western invention; however the Middle East contains the world's oldest civilizations, evidence of writing, and libraries. This course begins by critically examining the history of Arab libraries and socio-economic influences, from 7th century BC Iraq to current day, and how they influenced European knowledge systems; followed by examining socio-cultural characteristics of Arab cultures, and the intersection of digital and privacy needs, censorship and surveillance on people's information behavior, publishing and public library response. The course aims to foster cross-cultural understanding of Arab libraries and providing services to Arabs in the US.

LIS 598 D: Data Management & Re-use

Instructor: Megan Finn
3 credits; Standard grading
Online asynchronous

Autumn 2022

IMT 589 A: Introduction to Offensive Cybersecurity

Instructor: Andrew McKenna
4 credits; standard grading

This course provides the foundational knowledge and skills required for offensive cybersecurity careers, helping the student understand offensive cybersecurity consulting practices and techniques. Students will cover various offensive engagement scoping models, hardware and application enumeration techniques, gain hands-on experience with industry-standard offensive networking tools and practices, and understand the implementation and components of common authentication and authorization bypass techniques. The three main environment targets for the course will be web applications, computing endpoints, and cloud infrastructure

IMT 589 B: People Analytics

Instructor: Heather Whiteman
4 credits; standard grading

People are the most important resource to any organization, government, non-profit or social movement. People analytics focuses on the application of data-based insights to the process of understanding, measuring and recognizing the value of people.

This course prepares students to think critically about the quantification of people with a particular emphasis on the measurement and use of data about people in employment, government, and other groups of individuals. It introduces concepts from psychology, sociology, business analytics, information systems, data science, and data visualization/storytelling in order to equip students with an ability to source, evaluate, manage, and analyze people data. The course places special emphasis on the unique challenges and societal implications of data created by, gathered on, and about people. It introduces students to the art of measuring intangibles and highlights the impact and importance of data privacy, ethics, governance and bias in the creation and use of people information systems and data driven technology.

IMT 598 A: Digital Transformation

Instructor: Fawad Khan
3 credits; standard grading

This course is going to introduce the concept of Digital Transformation and Cloud's key emerging technologies and how they are forcing companies to review and formulate a digital strategy which affects the bottom line of any company. We will review the key digital transformation strategy pillars and use Cloud's key emerging technologies, including Cognitive Computing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and IoT to build solutions and applications to help the organizations along this digital journey.

IMT 598 B: Advanced Data Science

Instructor: Naveen Ashish
3 credits; standard grading

INFO 498 A: Technology and Childhood - Theory, Research & Practice

Instructor: Megan Boddum
5 credits; standard grading

This course introduces students to theory, research, and applied work in the area of children’s technology and media. Students will develop a foundational knowledge of child development theory and will take a critical perspective on how developmental theory relates to the creation and use of educational technology products for children. Instructors and guest lecturers will bring in real-world examples reflecting their experiences as academic researchers, educators, and specialists in the children's technology sector. Students will complete readings, assignments, and hands-on projects designed around an area of children’s technology.

INFO 498 B: Design Systems for Digital Experiences

Instructors: Nam-ho Park and Nancy Tran
5 credits; standard grading

A unified design system is an essential tool for building cohesive user experience across web, mobile and offline, embodying usability and accessibility best practices, while projecting the branding of the organization it serves. Industry leaders such as Google and Airbnb have recently developed comprehensive design systems and principles for efficiently managing design and interaction consistency across a vast array of digital products, online web properties and offline visual communications.

This course equips students with industry standard practices for understanding, developing, and implementing design systems for digital environments and experiences. Students will have hands-on project-based activities to research and analyze existing branding and usage contexts, develop principles and components, and apply them to real-world scenarios to test the robustness of their designs.

INFO 498 C: COVID Data Dashboards

Instructor: Megan Finn
4 credits; standard grading
Online synchronous

COVID data dashboards allow publics to make sense of the pandemic. This class addresses the COVID data infrastructures that underpin public dashboards, specifically the work that goes into building and maintaining COVID data infrastructures. We will look into theories of information infrastructures and disasters as well as the history of pandemics in the United States and abroad. We will consider the social, technical, and environmental dynamics involved in producing COVID data infrastructures with a special emphasis on open source.

INSC 598 A: Critical and Cultural Dimensions in Information Science

Instructor: Lindah Kotut
4 credits; standard grading

This course uses a variety of critical lenses to explore emerging topics, assess research practices, and evaluate various methodologies at the intersection of culture and technology. Through readings, written reflections and in-class discussions, students will engage with academic writings on historical and emerging themes and apply culturally-aware theories and structural frameworks for observation and analysis. Topics will include broad view of cultural aspects related to power (who wields it, how it is used/abused, harms it causes, and remedies to harm) and agency (what it looks like, how it is held/lost, how it is suppressed/amplified).

LIS 598 A: Future of Research Libraries

Instructor: Carole Palmer
3 credits; standard grading
Online asynchronous

This course will examine top trends in research libraries, covering short- and long-term trends that have been identified and predicted. Key trends will be examined and assessed, with particular attention to how libraries and the profession are responding and how the they need evolve in the future. A key tenet underlying the course: “Academic and research libraries are not just a vital part of scholarship, but also advance knowledge and society as a whole. They play an important role as curators and purveyors of high-quality research, supported by innovative infrastructure. (Annual Horizon Report: 2017 Library Edition.)