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Thinking Through Interfaces, a syllabus

*That looks enlightening.

THINKING THROUGH INTERFACES

Co-taught by Zed Adams (Philosophy) and Shannon Mattern (Media Studies)

Tuesdays 4:00 - 5:50pm | 6 East 16th St #1003

Interfaces are everywhere and nowhere. They pervade our lives, mediating our interactions with one another, technology, and the world. But their very pervasiveness also makes them invisible. In this seminar, we expose the hidden lives of interfaces, illuminating not just what they are and how they work, but also how they shape our lives, for better and worse. We also discuss a number of pressing social and political issues, such as why we are quick to adopt some interfaces (e.g., smartphones and social media platforms), but reluctant to embrace others (e.g., new voting machines and Google Glass).

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RESOURCES

With a few exceptions, all readings will be made available on our class website, at http://www.wordsinspace.net/interfaces/2019/. We’ll provide everyone with a copy of Tom Mullaney’s The Chinese Typewriter and David Parisi’s Archaeologies of Touch.

SCHEDULE OF MEETINGS

WEEK 1: JANUARY 22: INTRODUCTIONS

What is an interface?

How are interfaces differentiated?

Can an interface become a part of our mind?

Do interfaces shape what we use them to do?

What are the limits of interfaces: what problems do they not help us solve?

WEEKS 2 AND 3: CONCEPTUALIZATION

WEEK 2: JANUARY 29: CONCEPTUALIZATION I

Nelson Goodman, “The Theory of Notation” (Chapter Four), Languages of Art (Hackett, 1976): 127-173.

Florian Cramer and Matthew Fuller, “Interface” in Software Studies, ed., Matthew Fuller (MIT Press, 2008): 149-53.

Johanna Drucker, “Interface and Interpretation” and “Designing Graphic Interpretation” in Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press, 2014): 138-97.

WEEK 3: FEBRUARY 5: CONCEPTUALIZATION II

Shannon Mattern, “Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard,” Places Journal (March 2015).

Shannon Mattern, “Things that Beep: A Brief History of Product Sound Design,” Avant (August 2018).

We encourage you to think, too, about how interfaces might embody different cultures and ideologies. Consider, for example, feminist interfaces or indigenous interfaces -- or interfaces that embody universal, accessible design. You'll find some relevant resources in the modules at the end of this syllabus, and we'll explore many of these themes as part of our case studies throughout the semester.

In-Class Workshop (second half of class): small-group interface critiques

Supplemental:

Christian Ulrich Andersen and Soren Bro Pold, eds., Interface Criticism: Aesthetics Beyond the Buttons (Aarhus University Press, 2011).

Martijn de Waal, The City as Interface: How New Media Are Changing the City (nai010, 2014).

Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approach to Interface Theory,” Culture Machine 12 (2011).

Johanna Drucker, “Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7:1 (2013).

Florian Hadler and Joachim Haupt, “Towards a Critique of Interfaces” in Interface Critique, eds., Florian Hadler and Joachim Haupt (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2016): 7-16.

John Haugeland, “Representational Genera” in Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind, ed. Haugeland (Harvard Univ Press, 1992): 171-206.

Branden Hookway, Interface (MIT Press, 2014)

Interface Critique (journal).

Steven Johnson, Interface Culture (Basic Books, 1999)

Matthew Katz, “Analog Representations and Their Users,” Synthese 193: 3 (June 2015): 851-871.

Kimon Keramidas, The Interface Experience - A User’s Guide (Bard Graduate Center, 2015).

Shannon Mattern, “Interfacing Urban Intelligence,” Places Journal (April 2014).

Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (Basic Books, 2013).

Mitchell Whitelaw, “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9:1 (2015).

Jeff Johnson, Designing with the Mind in Mind (Morgan Kauffmann, 2014).

WEEKS 4 AND 5: TYPEWRITER KEYBOARDS

Our first case study is the QWERTY keyboard. This case raises fundamental questions about why interfaces are adopted in the first place, the extent to which their original designs constrain how they are subsequently used, and how particular linguistic politics and epistemologies are embodied in our interfaces.

WEEK 4: FEBRUARY 12: KEYBOARDS & QWERTY

Andy Clark, Chapters One through Three, and Ten, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (MIT Press, 1998): 11-69 and 193-218.

S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, “The Fable of the Keys,” The Journal of Law & Economics 33:1 (1990): 1-25.

WEEK 5: FEBRUARY 19: OTHER KEYBOARDS

Thomas S. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017): Chapter 1, 35-74; Chapter 4, 161-93; Chapter 6, 237-53 (up through “How Ancient China Missed…”; and Chapter 7, 283-8 (through “China’s First ‘Model Typist’”).

Kim Sterelny, “Minds: Extended or Scaffolded?” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9:4 (2010): 465-481.

See Marcin Wichary’s forthcoming book about the global history of keyboards, as well as his research newsletters.

4-5pm: Skype TBD

Supplemental:

Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain (Princeton University Press, 2015).

Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58:1 (1998): 7-19.

Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford University Press, 1986).

Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford University Press, 1999).

John Haugeland, “Mind Embodied and Embedded,” Having Thought (Harvard University Press, 1998): 207-237.

Richard Heersmink, "A taxonomy of cognitive artifacts: function, information, and categories." Review of philosophy and psychology 4.3 (2013): 465-481.

Richard Heersmink, "The Metaphysics of Cognitive Artefacts," Philosophical Explorations 19.1 (2016): 78-93.

Neil M. Kay, “Rerun the Tape of History and QWERTY Always Wins,” Research Policy 42:6-7 (2013): 1175-85.

Prince McLean, “Inside the Multitouch FingerWorks Tech in Apple’s Tablet,” Apple Insider (January 23, 2010).

Jan Noyes, “QWERTY - The Immoral Keyboard,” Computing & Control Engineering Journal 9:3 (1998): 117-22.

Kim Sterelny, The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique (MIT Press, 2012).

Cassie Werber, “The Future of Typing Doesn’t Involve a Keyboard,” Quartz (November 23, 2018).

Darren Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Cornell University Press, 2007).

WEEKS 6 AND 7: HAPTICS

WEEK 6: FEBRUARY 26: PUSHING BUTTONS

H. P. Grice, “Some Remarks About the Senses,” in Analytical Philosophy, First Series, ed. R. J. Butler (OUP Press, 1962): 248-268. Reprinted in F. MacPherson (ed), The Senses (OUP Press, 2011): 83-101.

Matthew Fulkerson, “Rethinking the Senses and Their Interactions: The Case for Sensory Pluralism,” Frontiers in Psychology (December 10, 2014).

Rachel Plotnick, “Setting the Stage,” in Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing (MIT Press, 2018): 3-16.

Rachel Plotnick, “Force, Flatness, and Touch Without Feeling: Thinking Historically About Haptics and Buttons,” New Media and Society 19:10 (2017): 1632-52.

WEEK 7: MARCH 5: HAPTICS II

David Parisi, Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (University of Minnesota Press, 2017): Introduction, 1-40; Chapter 3, 151-212; and Chapter 4, 213-264.

4-5pm: Skype with Dave Parisi

Supplemental:

Sandy Isenstadt, “At the Flip of a Switch,” Places Journal (September 2018).

Mathias Fuchs, Moisés Mañas, and Georg Russegger, “Ludic Interfaces,” in Exploring Videogames: Culture, Design and Identity, eds., Nick Webber and Daniel Riha (Interdisciplinary-Net Press): 31-40.

Matthew Fulkerson, The First Sense: A Philosophical Study of Human Touch (MIT Press, 2013).

Gerard Goggin, “Disability and Haptic Mobile Media,” New Media & Society 19:10 (2017): 1563-80.

Kim Knight, “Wearable Interfaces, Networked Bodies, and Feminist Interfaces,” MLA Commons (2018).

Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone (Little, Brown, 2017).

Stephen Monteiro, The Fabric of Interface: Mobile Media, Design, and Gender (MIT Press, 2017).

David Parisi, “Games Interfaces as Bodily Techniques,” Handbook of Research on Effective Electronic Gaming in Education, ed. Richard Ferdig (IGI Global): 111-126.

David Parisi, Mark Paterson, and Jason Edward Arches, eds., “Haptic Media” Special Issue, New Media & Society 19:10 (October 2017).

Rachel Plotnick, “At the Interface: The Case of the Electric Push Button, 1880-1923,” Technology and Culture 53:4 (October 2012): 815-45.

MARCH 11 @ NOON

Share your final project and presentation proposal with Zed and Shannon. See “Assignments” for more detail.

WEEK 8: MARCH 12

Individual meetings to discuss presentations and final projects

MARCH 19: NO CLASS: SPRING BREAK

WEEKS 9-10: VOICE

WEEK 9: MARCH 26: History of Vocal Interfaces (Zed away)

Mara Mills, “Media and Prosthesis: The Vocoder, the Artificial Larynx, and the History of Signal Processing,” Qui Parle 21:1 (Fall/Winter 2012): 107-49.

Danielle Van Jaarsveld and Winifred Poster, “Call Centers: Emotional Labor Over the Phone,” in Emotional Labor in the 21st Century: Diverse Perspectives on Emotion Regulation at Work, ed. Alicia Grandey, Jim Diefendorff, and Deborah Rupp (LEA Press, 2012): 153-73.

Confirm the assigned text for your presentation: send to Shannon and Zed a complete Chicago-style citation and either a high-quality pdf or a link to the online resource before class today, so we can update our class website with everyone’s material.

WEEK 10: APRIL 2: Contemporary Vocal Interfaces

Adelheid Voshkul, “Humans, Machines, and Conversations: An Ethnographic Study of the Making of Automatic Speech Recognition Technologies,” Social Studies of Science 34:3 (2004).

Andrea L. Guzman, “Voices in and of the Machine: Source Orientation Toward Mobile Virtual Assistants,” Computers in Human Behavior (2018).

Halcyon M. Lawrence and Lauren Neefe, “When I Talk to Siri,” Flash Readings 4 (September 6, 2017) {podcast: 10:14}.

Halcyon M. Lawrence, “Inauthentically Speaking: Speech Technology, Accent Bias and Digital Imperialism,” SIGCIS, Computer History Museum, March 2017 {video: 1:26 > 17:16}

Lauren McCarthy, LAUREN. A human smart home intelligence (review press, too).

4-5pm: Skype with Halcyon M. Lawrence

Supplemental:

Meryl Alper, Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality (MIT Press, 2017).

Michel Chion, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise (Duke, 2016).

Karin Bijsterveld, “Dissecting Sound: Speaker Identification at the Stasi and Sonic Ways of Knowing,” Hearing Modernity (2018).

Trevor Cox, Now You’re Talking: The Story of Human Communication from the Neanderthals to Artificial Intelligence (Counterpoint, 2018).

Brian Dumaine, “It Might Get Loud: Inside Silicon Valley’s Battle to Own Voice Tech,” Fortune (October 24, 2018).

Larry Greenemeier, “Alexa, How Do We Take Our Relationship to the Next Level?” Scientific American (April 26, 2018).

Jason Kincaid, “A Brief History of ASR,” descript (July 12, 2018).

Halcyon M. Lawrence, “Siri Disciplines,” in Your Computer is on Fire, eds., Marie Hicks, Ben Peters, Kavita Philips and Tom Mullaney (MIT Press, forthcoming 2019).

Halcyon Lawrence and Lauren Neefe, “Siri’s Progeny: Voice and the Future of Interaction Design,” Georgia Tech, Fall 2016.

Xiaochang Li and Mara Mills, “Vocal Features: From Voice Identification to Speech Recognition by Machine,” Technology and Culture (forthcoming 2019).

Luke Munn, “Alexa and the Intersectional Interface,” _Angles (June 2018).

Quynh N. Nguyen, Ahn Ta, and Victor Prybutok, “An Integrated Model of Voice-User Interface Continuance Intention: The Gender Effect,” International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (2018).

Winifred Poster, “Sound Bites, Sentiments, and Accents: Digitizing Communicative Labor in the Era of Global Outsourcing,” in digitalSTS: A Field Guide for Science & Technology Studies, eds., David Ribes and Janet Vertesi (Princeton University Press, forthcoming April 2019).

Winifred Poster, “The Virtual Receptionist with a Human Touch: Opposing Pressures of Digital Automation and Outsourcing in Interactive Services” in Invisible Labor: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World, eds. Marion G. Crain, Winifred R. Poster, and Miriam A. Cherry (University of California Press, 2016): 87-111.

Thom Scott-Phillips, Speaking our Minds: Why Human Communication is Different, and How Language Evolved to Make it Special (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Craig S. Smith, “Alexa and Siri Can Hear This Hidden Command. You Can’t,” New York Times (May 10, 2018).

Dave Tompkins, How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks (Stop Smiling Books, 2011).

Mickey Vallee, “Biometrics, Affect, Autoaffection and the Phenomenological Voice,” Subjectivity 11:2 (2018): 161-76.

Bruce N. Walker and Michael A. Nees, “Theory of Sonification” in The Sonification Handbook, eds. Thomas Hermann, Andy Hunt, and John G. Neuhoff (Logos Publishing, 2011).

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