I690: HCI Ph.D. Seminar, Unit 1: "Information Culture"

Fall 2006, School of Informatics, HCI/Design

Seminar Instructor: Erik Stolterman (estolter@indiana.edu)
8-Week Unit Instructor: Jeffrey Bardzell (jbardzel@indiana.edu)

This 8-week unit gives Ph.D. students in HCI an opportunity to learn and practice the theories and associated methodologies of “information culture” design and criticism. The term “information culture” was coined by Lev Manovich to describe “the ways in which information is presented in different cultural sites and objects—road signs; displays in airports and train stations; television on-screen menus; graphic layouts of television news…; and … the interfaces of computer operating systems … and software applications” (13).

Manovich describes information culture as parallel to visual culture, and in his analyses, he liberally borrows the critical strategies and research methodologies of visual culture. So will we. 

This course focuses on two major approaches to visual culture: the phenomenological/ hermeneutical tradition (e.g., Heidegger, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty) and the structuralist/semiotic tradition (Saussure, Derrida, Barthes, Metz). After an introductory week, in which we explore the notion of an information medium—particularly digital ones—we’ll devote about three weeks each to phenomenological and semiotic approaches to information culture.

We will use cinema as an ongoing case study throughout the semester, because it already contains a rich body of theory from both of these major approaches and because cinematic language and organization are major precursors to contemporary information interfaces. The film theory, therefore, is the applied philosophy/cultural theory and should provide us both greater understanding of the more abstract theory and also a model moving forward as we design the next generation of information culture theory.

Policies, Assignments, and Grading

This course is a Ph.D. seminar; therefore, I will not be preparing detailed lectures in which I explicate theory and painstakingly justify its relevance for design. As scholars, you need (and are ready) to take up this burden yourselves!

Therefore, this course will be reading and discussion-based. Other than constructing a list of readings and architecting our conversation at the highest level, it is my expectation and requirement that you will take over the class and set the particulars of its intellectual agenda.

To do so, you will need not only to “get through” all of the readings; I expect you to engage with them, coming away with original questions, criticisms, and/or novel applications and connections. Therefore, you should come to class with notes, questions, problems, and interesting thoughts in-hand.

In addition, each student will turn in one medium paper (about 6 pages including references, single-spaced, size 10 Times, ACM CHI specifications) in which you explicate 1-3 information interfaces as artifacts of information culture, using either a phenomenological/hermeneutic or a structural/semiotic approach.

The course has few policies and few grades as a result.

• I expect everyone to attend every class meeting.
• I expect everyone to be significantly prepared for every class meeting.
• I will provide Erik a grade for each of you based on two criteria:
• Class participation (not the same as attendance!) = 50%
• Paper = 50%
• What Erik does with that grade is up to him!

Course Schedule

The course schedule is as follows. We’ll fill in the dates as a group.

Grand Topic	Reading	Purpose of Reading
Understanding “information culture” (Week 1)	Dourish, “Preface,” vii-ix	Motivating the need to consider the philosophical underpinnings of computer science and HCI/D
	Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 217-42	Technology, meaning, social value/ideology; a Marxist approach to cinema and technology
	Manovich, “Introduction,” 6-17	A “theory of the present” and a general approach (“digital materialism”) toward analyzing emerging new media and “information culture”
Two traditions of visual culture (Week 2)	Barnard, “Introduction,” “Understanding Visual Culture,” and “Explanation and Understanding: Visual Culture and Social Science,” 1-39	Overview of the two traditions: phenomenology and semiotics
The phenomenological and hermeneutic tradition (Weeks 3-5)	Barnard, “Interpretation and the Individual,” 41-63	The human subject as interpreter, relationships between “horizons” and understanding
	Metz, “On the Impression of Reality in the Cinema,” 3-15	A phenomenological approach to cinema (especially: the participatory realism of cinema)
	Prince, “True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory,” 270-82.	Reflections on how digital special effects (e.g., dinosaurs in Jurassic Park) alter cinematic realism
	Dourish, “’Being-in-the-World’: Embodied Interaction,” “Foundations,” “Moving Toward Design,” 99-188	A theory of embodied design in the context of HCI
	** Winograd & Flores, “Understanding and Being,” and “Using Computers: A Direction for Design,” 27-37; 163-74	On the utility of “thrownness” and “breakdown” for design and analysis
The structuralist and semiotic tradition (Weeks 5-7)	Barnard, “Semiology, Iconography, and Iconology,” 143-67	Introduction to the conceptual vocabulary of semiotics: signifier and signified; icon, index, symbol; syntagm and paradigm
	Berger, “Semiotic Analysis,” 35-52	The semiotic analysis of media, especially semiotics as a methodology
	Hodge & Kress, “Social Semiotics,” 1-12	Introduction to semiotics specifically as an approach to the social sciences (as opposed to, say, literary analysis)
	Metz, “Some Points in the Semiotics of Cinema,” 92-107	A general exploration of the application of semiotics to film
	** Metz, “Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film,” 108-48	One of the most useful technical applications of semiotics ever done
Conclusion, or Towards a Synthesis for HCI/D (Week 8)	Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” 23-40	A classic examination of how the history of technology in film shapes the history of filmmaking, editing, meaning, and audience reception
	Manovich, “Menus, Filters, Plug-Ins,” 123-35	A “reading” of interfaces in which Manovich proposes “the logic of selection,” a techno-cultural phenomenon that now shapes all artistic production

** Articles marked thus are only required if you are writing your paper on that approach. That is, those choosing to write about phenomenology are required to read the Winograd and Flores, while those choosing to write about semiotics are required to read the Metz “Problems of Denotation” paper.

References

Following are the references for the readings. Bolded items I recommend that you buy, because we will be reading extensively from them. The others we will collectively copy and distribute.

Barnard, Malcolm. (2001). Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture. New York: Palgrave.

Bazin, André. (2005 [1967]). “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.” What is Cinema? Ed. and trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Benjamin, Walter. (1968 [1936]). “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books. 217-52. (This is widely anthologized and probably even online, so any uncut version will work.)

Berger, Arthur Asa. (2000). Media and Communication Research Methods: An Introduction to Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Dourish, Paul. (2001). Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hodge, Robert and Gunther Kress. (1988). Social Semiotics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Manovich, Lev. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Metz, Christian. (1974). Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Trans. Michael Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Prince, Stephen. “True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory.” Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 270-82.

Winograd, Terry, and Fernando Flores. (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Boston: Addison-Wesley.