Algorithms and the Arts with Mary Isbell (Fall 2022)

This course is built around questions. It started as I was teaching a review-writing course and realized that we’re relying less and less on reviewers and more on recommendation algorithms to discover new creative works. And so this course is crafted to tackle some big questions: How do we decide what creative works to engage with? How did people discover what they loved before the Internet? How often is an algorithm influencing what we choose to watch, read, or listen to? What is the relationship between recommendation algorithms and human reviewers? Are social media influencers reviewers?

These are some of my questions. I’ve designed this course so it is also (even more!) shaped by the questions that emerge for you about this topic. This might take us in a direction I can’t predict while writing this course description in August. I hope this happens. There is no requirement that you memorize or become an expert in any of the concepts we discuss, though I suspect we will all leave feeling more aware of the network of algorithms that shape our experiences. I do strongly recommend that you bring your own interests, experiences, and questions to the work of the course. I have selected a few creative works that we will all read, watch, or listen to together, but you will complete your assignments by engaging with creative works that you have chosen. My taste is probably not your taste, but I am endlessly fascinated to learn about the things my students find beautiful, compelling, and thought-provoking. It has often inspired my own interest in artists that I wasn’t familiar with (like Sherente Harris, who a student reviewed in a previous course) or genres (like machinima, which a student researched to improve a Wikipedia article). Some of you may feel like you don’t want to share the particulars of your interests with me and/or the rest of the class. For this reason, I use a system called “your doc/our doc,” which we’ll get familiar with over the course of the semester. I hope that you’ll feel comfortable exploring on your own and sharing what you would like of that experience with me and your classmates.