├── README.md └── cloud-syllabus.md /README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # clouds 2 | 3 | A syllabus for a course offered in the Ph.D. Program in English at CUNY Graduate Center in Fall 2016 4 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /cloud-syllabus.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | #CLOUDS# 2 | Fall 2016
3 | CUNY Graduate Center
4 | ENGL 89500 / MALS 7850
5 | 4:15pm - 6:15pm Tuesdays
6 | Room 4419
7 | http://cuny.is/clouds
8 | 9 | Dr. Matthew K. Gold
10 | http://mkgold.net
11 | mgold@gc.cuny.edu
12 | (212) 817-8481
13 | Office hours: TH 4pm-5pm and by appointment
14 | Room 4108.01 15 | 16 | This course explores the cloud as condition, metaphor, and infrastructure of the modern web. Our aim will be to come to know and theorize the materiality of the network in ways that account not only for its presence in the physical world, but also its rootedness in a variety of social and political contexts. We will explore local instantiations of cloud infrastructure in an effort to trace the material nature of the internet; explore fictional, theoretical, and philosophical accounts of the network; look at the environmental consequences of networked infrastructures; and play, when possible, with cloud-based reading and writing practices. By the end of the semester, we will have viewed “the cloud” from a variety of perspectives that reveal it to be not a virtual abstraction, but rather a set of material, social, and political instantiations, practices, and infrastructures embedded in our lives. 17 | 18 | Requirements
19 | Schedule
20 | Assignments
21 | Acknowledgements
22 | 23 | ## Requirements ## 24 | **Requirements (All Students)** 25 | * Regular Attendance 26 | * Completion of all course readings 27 | * Classroom participation 28 | 29 | **3 Credit Requirements (MALS 7850)** 30 | * Annotated Bibliography & Presentation (5 texts minimum) 31 | * Cloud text experiment 32 | * Blog Posts (3 over the course of the semester) 33 | * Final Presentation 34 | * Final paper or project (15-20 pages) 35 | 36 | **4 Credit Requirements (ENGL 89500)** 37 | * Annotated Bibliography & Presentation (10 texts minimum) 38 | * Cloud text experiment 39 | * Blog Posts (4 over the course of the semester) 40 | * Final Presentation 41 | * Final paper or project (20-25 pages) 42 | 43 | **Notes:** 44 | Auditors are required to complete all assignments except for the Final Presentation and Final Paper. 45 | 46 | Students in the doctoral English program may use the Annotated Bibliography assignment as part of the Portfolio they submit for the program’s First Exam. 47 | 48 | **Grading** 49 | * Class Participation: 20% 50 | * Annotated Bibliography and Presentation: 20% 51 | * Blog posts and Cloud Text Experiment: 10% 52 | * Final Paper or Project: 50% 53 | 54 | 55 | ##Schedule## 56 | 57 | 8/30 Intro to the class and to each other
58 | * Ryan S. Jeffery and Boaz Levin, “All That is Solid Melts into Data” (7 min clip) - http://spheres-journal.org/all-that-is-solid-melts-into-data/ 59 | 60 | 9/6 Cloud / **Futures**
61 | * William Gibson, *The Peripheral* (first half) 62 | 63 | 9/13 No Class Meeting (Prof. Gold Traveling)
64 | Cloud / **Futures 2**
65 | * William Gibson, *The Peripheral* (second half) 66 | * Shannon Mattern, “Scaffolding, Hard and Soft – Infrastructures as Critical and Generative Structures.” Spheres 3: Unstable Infrastructures. http://spheres-journal.org/scaffolding-hard-and-soft-infrastructures-as-critical-and-generative-structures/ 67 | 68 | 9/20 Cloud / **Infrastructures 1**
69 | * Tung-Hui Hu, *A Prehistory of the Cloud* 70 | * Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” *Annual Review of Anthropology*, Vol. 42, 2013, pp. 327-343. 71 | 72 | 9/27 Cloud / **Infrastructures 2**
73 | * Nicole Starosielski, “Fixed Flow: Undersea Cables as Media Instructure” 74 | * Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, “‘Where the Internet Lives”: Data Centers” 75 | * Shannon Mattern, “Deep Time of Media Infrastructure” 76 | * Orit Halpern, “Cloudy Architectures,” *continent* 4.3 (2015) http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/205
77 | *Recommended (not required)*
78 | * Faisal Khan, “How are major undersea cables laid in the ocean?” *Quora*. https://www.quora.com/How-are-major-undersea-cables-laid-in-the-ocean?redirected_qid=2316974 79 | * Neal Stephenson, “Mother Earth Mother Board.” *Wired*. 1 December 1996. http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ 80 | 81 | 10/4 **No class (GC-wide)** 82 | 83 | 10/11 **No class (GC-wide)** 84 | 85 | 10/14 (FRI) Cloud / **Media** 86 | * John Durham Peters, *The Marvelous Clouds* (selections) 87 | * Adrian Mackenzie, *Wirelessness* (selections) 88 | * Jane Bennett, *Vibrant Matter* (selections) 89 | * Bruno Latour, *Reassembling the Social* (selections) 90 | * Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, *a thousand plateaus* (selections) 91 | 92 | 10/18 Cloud / **Environments** 93 | * Jennifer Gabrys, *Program Earth* (selections) 94 | * Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker, Eds., *Sustainable Media* (selections) 95 | * Janet Walker and Nicole Starosielski, "Introduction" 96 | * Nicole Starosielski, "Pipeline Ecologies: Rural Entanglements of Fiber-Optic Cables" 97 | * Rahul Mukherjee, "Mediating Infrastructures: (Im)Mobile Toxicity and Cell Antenna Publics" 98 | * Jennifer Gabrys, "Re-thingfying the Internet of Things" 99 | * Sy Taffel, “Escaping Attention: Digital Media Hardware, Materiality And Ecological Cost.” Culture Machine, Vol 13 (2012). http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/468 100 | * Shannon Mattern, “Cloud and Field.” *Places*. August 2016. https://placesjournal.org/article/cloud-and-field/ 101 | 102 | 10/25 Cloud / **Sovereignties** 103 | * Benjamin H. Bratton, *The Stack* (selections) 104 | * Helga Tawil-Souri, “Cellular Borders: Dis/Connecting Phone Calls in Israel/Palestine” 105 | * Boaz Levin and Ryan Jeffery, “Lost in the Cloud: The Representation of Networked Infrastructure and its Discontents.” Spheres 3. http://spheres-journal.org/lost-in-the-cloud-the-representation-of-networked-infrastructure-and-its-discontents-2/ 106 | * Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control." *October*, Vol. 59 (Winter, 1992), pp. 3-7. 107 | * Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, *Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest* (selections) 108 | 109 | 11/1 Cloud / **Labor** 110 | * Trebor Scholz, Ed., *Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory* (selections) 111 | * Karën Fort, "Amazon Mechanical Turk: Gold Mine or Coal Mine?" *American Journal of Computational Linguistics*. 2011. Vol 37, Issue 2: 413 -420 112 | * Hitlin, Paul. “Research in the Crowdsourcing Age, a Case Study.” Pew Research Center. July 2016. http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/07/11/research-in-the-crowdsourcing-age-a-case-study/ 113 | * Andrew Russell, “Hail the Maintainers.” *Aeon*. 7 April 2016. https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more 114 | 115 | 11/8 Cloud / **Networks**
116 | * Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, *Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics* (selections) 117 | * Alexander Galloway, *Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization* (selections) 118 | * Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, *The Exploit: A Theory of Networks* (selections) 119 | 120 | 11/15 Cloud / **Infrastructures 3**
121 | **Final paper proposal Due**
122 | **SITE VISIT WITH ANDREW BLUM (Location TBD)**
123 | * Kazys Varnelis, “Centripetal City,” *Cabinet* 17 (Spring 2004/5) 124 | * Andrew Blum, Tubes (selections) 125 | * Shannon Mattern. “Infrastructural Tourism.” *Places*. July 2013. https://placesjournal.org/article/infrastructural-tourism/ 126 | * Burrington, Ingrid. *Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure* 127 | * Mendelsohn, Ben. “Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors” https://vimeo.com/30642376 128 | * Emily S. Rueb and Eiko Ojala. “New York 101: Why are the streets always under construction?” New York Times. 18 August 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/18/nyregion/new-york-101-streets-repair-and-maintenance.html 129 | 130 | 11/22 Cloud / **Writing**
131 | **Cloud Text Experiment Due**
132 | * Marjorie Perloff, *Unoriginal Genius* (selections) 133 | * Kenneth Goldsmith, *Uncreative Writing* (selections) 134 | * Mark Sample, “A protest bot is a bot so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit: A Call for Bots of Conviction” https://medium.com/@samplereality/a-protest-bot-is-a-bot-so-specific-you-cant-mistake-it-for-bullshit-90fe10b7fbaa#.r95kew4fp 135 | * Rob Dubbin, “The Rise Of Twitter Bots.” *The New Yorker*. 14 November 2013. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-rise-of-twitter-bots 136 | 137 | 11/29 Cloud / **Vision** 138 | * Jonathan Crary, *24/7* (selections) 139 | * Lorraine Daston, “Cloud Physiognomy.” *Representations*, Vol. 135 No. 1, Summer 2016; (pp. 45-71) 140 | * Zach Blas, “Facial Recognition Suite.” *interventions*. 13 March 2014. https://interventionsjournal.net/2014/03/13/artist-project-facial-weaponization-suite/ 141 | * Simone Browne, “Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity and Biometrics.” *Critical Sociology*. January 2010. Issue 36: 131-150. 142 | 143 | 12/6 **Final Presentations** 144 | 145 | 12/13 **No Class -- Reading Day** 146 | 147 | 12/20 **Final Papers Due** 148 | 149 | 150 | 151 | ##Assignments## 152 | 153 | **Annotated Bibliography & Presentation**
154 | Sign up: http://www.SignUpGenius.com/go/4090E4AAFA929A46-clouds
155 | Choose a research topic related to the course and find texts (at least 5 for students in the 3-credit version of the course and at least 10 for students in the 4-credit version) related to it (articles or books count equally as a text. For each text, provide a bibliographical citation in MLA format and a 1-2 paragraph description of the text. Your description should gloss the argument/contribution of the text in question and should also explain its relevance to your research topic. Be sure to explore academic databases from the GC Library such as the MLA International Bibliography as you are doing research. For more on writing an annotated bibliography, please see this resource: http://guides.library.cornell.edu/annotatedbibliography. 156 | 157 | Your annotated bibliography is due on the date of your presentation. It should be posted to our course blog in the “Annotated Bibliographies” category, tagged with terms related to your topic. In your presentation, you should introduce us to your research topic and walk us through the sources you’ve explored. 158 | 159 | **Blog Posts**
160 | Create a post on our course blog related to our readings. You might provide a reaction to something we’ve read; share resources related to the course; or work through ideas related to our class discussions. For more on academic blogging, please consult this guide: http://twp.duke.edu/uploads/media_items/blogging-introduction.original.pdf 161 | 162 | 3 posts minimum required for 3-credit course number; 4 posts minimum required for 4-credit course number. 163 | 164 | **Cloud text experiment**
165 | This assignment asks you to experiment and play, in some way, with a cloud-based writing system such as Twitter. You can create a twitterbot by following this guide by GC Digital Fellow Patrick Smyth - https://github.com/smythp/twitter-workshop, create a networked performance of some kind along the lines of Ian Bogost’s Bloomsday experiment -- http://bogost.com/writing/blog/bloomsday_on_twitter/, or do something else entirely. The goal here is to explore the affordances of cloud-based writing in some way, ideally inspired by our course readings. 166 | 167 | Write a blog post on our course blog describing your experiment in the category “Cloud Text Experiments.” (note: this blog post is in addition to your other required blog posts) 168 | 169 | 170 | **Final Presentation**
171 | On December 6, you will be asked to give a 5-7 minute presentation on your final paper project. You should introduce the class to the subject of your research and begin to describe the argument you are making in your paper. Not required of auditors. 172 | 173 | **Final Paper or Project**
174 | Your final paper (15-20 pages for 3-credit students, 20-25 pages for 4-credit students; not required of auditors) should explore a topic of research related to the course materials. You should submit a short (no more than one page) proposal about your topic on November 15. In your paper, focus particularly on your argument; discuss sources insofar as they help you advance your argument, but make sure that throughout the paper (and particularly in your transition sentences at the beginning of every paragraph), you are putting the focus on the argument you are trying to make. 175 | 176 | Should you wish to create a digital project of some kind for this class rather than a final paper, please meet with Prof. Gold to discuss. 177 | 178 | ##Acknowledgements## 179 | I am grateful to Shannon Mattern and Matt Kirschenbaum for their suggestions on a draft version of this syllabus. 180 | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------