This course explores possibilities and pitfalls of empathy in cinema and other audiovisual media. Focusing on cinematic framings of migration and visualizations of global connection, it analyzes how movement, borders, and settlement figure in different genres and formats.

This course explores, from a philosophical perspective, ethical questions arising from collecting, drawing inferences from, and acting on data, especially when these activities are automated and on a large scale. Topics include: bias, fairness, discrimination, interpretability, privacy, paternalism, freedom of speech, and democracy.

Meets Philosophy & Values, L&S Breadth Requirement

This course examines the use of natural language processing as a set of methods for exploring and reasoning about text as data, focusing especially on the applied side of NLP — using existing NLP methods and libraries in Python in new and creative ways (rather than exploring the core algorithms underlying them; see Info 159/259 for that).

This class is about renaissance humanists and how we can use digital means, as well as traditional ones, to study them. Our particular focus is on the ways people were connected in the renaissance -- as patrons, as readers, as travelers, as correspondents. Students will gather data about the travels and connections of their individual humanists. Then, working in groups, they will form databases and use mapping and network analysis on their data to chart interconnections between these historical figures over time.