The Most Important Idea
The internet is an emergent thing at the intersection of power, energy, information, materials, and humans. Always: humans. An archaeological perspective on this pays attention to entanglements and flows. And if we apply the appropriate lenses to how we look, we might begin to understand why and how.
Spend some time with Kate Crawford’s Calculating Empires to see what I mean (you’ll want to open this in a new browser window; try taking the audio tour, too).
My Philosophy of Learning
As a general philosophy of learning, I do not aim for ‘coverage’ of a topic. Rather, by exploring a topic as a series of connected stories or lenses I am trying to help you learn the skills that you will need to uncover whatever aspect of method and thought that will help you with your own research goals. I’m trying to give you frameworks and practice for deep reflective thinking. You might have expectations about what ‘university writing’ looks like and you are trying very hard to fit those expectations. That gets things exactly backwards.
Scholarly writing is what we do to figure out what we think. I therefore am trying to give you practice in getting set up for that moment. It’s about unpacking the game and the way scholarly thinking works. I want you to swing for the bleachers, and not to be afraid of whiffing on the ball. After all, to mix sporting metaphors, you’re here for ice-time, not the Stanley Cup.
You have to do the work, right? Learning is an active thing.
This is a course aimed at the first year student, newly arrived at Carleton. To be honest, such a person has not yet learned how to be a university student. All of the assessment therefore is geared towards creating the foundational habits-of-thought upon which you can build a successful learning experience. It’s weight training for your mind. So… no essays. But I guarantee you: you’ll write better essays elsewhere after this class.
Text/Tech
To the best of my ability, all materials will either be open access materials on the web or materials made available to us through MacOdrum Library or the University. You will not be required to purchase any set text or software.
Class format
This class happens on Mondays and Wednesdays, 11.35 am - 12.55 pm, in LA C264.
AI
All of the assessment happens in-class, by hand. This is because you do not have the scholarly background yet to deal with AI yet.
If you went to a gym, and there was a machine that lifted weights up and down for you, could you say that you’ve had a work-out, if the machine moved the weights around? Because isn’t that the point of a gym: moving weights from A to B? So a machine would be more efficient, and better at it? …Right?
That sound you hear is of a point being missed. The correct answer is, ’no’. The correct answer is, we lift the weights so that our muscles undergo the process of strengthening, conditioning, developing.
In the same way, the use of any generative AI system to create written work in a class is a pointless stupid thing to do. In the same way having a machine lift weights for you misses the point, so too does having a machine generate a ‘paper’. (Which incidentally will be just formed from statistical chains of plausible bullshit.) You’re in university to develop your mind, not to have a stack of papers on your desk.
You lift weights so that your body undergoes the process. The process is the point. You write to train your mind to think, to put your mind through a process.
The point was never to have x number of things-written. Yet, many people seem to treat university as the accumulation of papers in exchange for a piece of paper. That is profoundly sad.
But because AI is, at heart, a web technology, we will be looking at it and exploring some parts of it so that you can properly situate it in its broader context (and if you want to get a headstart at that, try ‘Models All The Way Down’. THAT WILL BE THE ONLY TIME where it will be ok to work with generative AI in this course.
Lift the weights for yourself. Anything else is… point-less. Null points. 0.
(I’ve written two books on artificial intelligence in archaeology and history. I know what I’m talking about.)