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Home > MSI Degree > Course Catalogue > Course Description
SI 648: InfoCulture: Theory and Methods in the History and Sociology of Information Technology
Explores key theoretical and methodological concerns in the history and sociology of information technology. The tools, methodologies, and analytic strategies are primarily those of history and the interpretive social sciences -- sociology, anthropology, communication, and cultural psychology, in disciplinary terms.
The first part of the course explores the history and historiography of information. Topically, it addresses the emergence of information technologies from writing and the book to modern media, computing, and the Internet. Theoretically, it explores debates around historical causation, trajectories, periodization, evidence, and the cultural framing and reception of information technologies and practices.
The second part of the course draws selectively on the literatures of qualitiative sociology, anthropology, cultural psychology, and the information sciences to explore a range of contemporary information phenomena: open source communities, online identities, creativity and play, distributed knowledge enterprises, mobile and ubiquitous computing, the semantic Web, etc.
The longer term goal of the course is to build a more solid, rigorous, and creative foundation for the social study of information by drawing on promising theoretical and methodological approaches developed in the social sciences at large.
Credits: 3
Term offered: Fall
Prerequisites:
SI 500 or permission of instructor
Home > MSI Degree > Course Catalogue > Course Description
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