Fall 2023 Courses

Newly Taught Fall Course Descriptions

Course options WITH computational/digital focus:

CDT 30614 Auditing AI: An Introduction

Taught by Cam Kormylo

As artificial intelligence (AI) grows increasingly pervasive in society, it is essential that we develop an understanding of how AI systems work. A vital part of this understanding is a careful consideration of various risks (e.g., the presence of bias, a lack of transparency, regulatory compliance) when AI systems are designed and deployed in real-world settings. To understand and address these concerns, this course introduces students to the fundamentals of AI auditing — the practice of evaluating and improving the ethics of AI systems. Through a combination of interactive discussions and semi-technical lab sessions, students will develop an auditing “toolkit”. This toolkit includes both theoretical and technical concepts, especially relevant for the increasingly interdisciplinary teams of the modern workforce. Students will work on group case assignments as “audit committees” that reflect the needs of a variety of stakeholders (e.g., developers, managers, investors, users). Groups will identify and discuss potential concerns or risks associated with AI systems as well as develop recommendations to address them. Overall, the course aims to provide an interdisciplinary and hands-on introduction to AI auditing, allowing students to gain insights into the opportunities and challenges associated with the design and deployment of AI systems that minimize societal risk and increase their effectiveness.

 

CDT 30630 Real Estate Disruption

Taught by Bruce Lohman

Technology is dramatically disrupting the real estate industry. Record amounts of capital allocation to both new technologies and business models is transforming the industry while presenting new opportunities and threats to businesses and practitioners. This course will examine a series of analytical frameworks and explore how technology is changing virtually all real estate activities. We will study individual Proptechs and Fintechs that are reinventing both residential and commercial real estate. Students will develop skills to better understand disruptive technologies and business models as future consumers, investors, developers, or management of such technologies. The course will utilize a combination of lectures, case studies, readings, industry speakers and student presentations.

 

CDT 30680 Digital Transformation in H.Ed

Taught by Sonia Howell

This course will examine the journey from pre-digital to digital, aka the "digital transformation", in higher education. Focusing on online learning, the use of artificial intelligence, and XR, we will explore their impact on teaching and learning. Through a series of case studies, readings, and guest speakers, we will explore how higher education institutions approach digital transformation and the opportunities and challenges brought about by new technologies. Students will gain hands-on experience working on projects with higher education professionals responsible for assessing, implementing, and stewarding digital transformations related to teaching and learning at Notre Dame. This course will benefit those interested in learning technologies and organizational evolution related to technology.

 

CDT 30709 Digital Solid Modeling

Taught by Jason Carley

MATERIALS FEE. With an orientation towards problem identification and the translation of research insights into implications informing the design process, students will learn how to develop a research plan and deploy an array of research methods including interviews, observation, shadowing, contextual inquiry, participatory observation and co-creative development. The course combines lecture with studio practice, with student teams engaging in human-centered, project-based work, sponsored by outside corporate organizations and non-profit social entities. This course is offered every semester and is open to Collaborative Innovation Minors and Design Majors.

 

CDT 30720 Digital Empires

Taught by Liang Cai

This course will provide advanced undergraduates and graduate students with a critical introduction to digital humanities for the study of early China, the fountainhead of Chinese Civilization. Collaborating with the Center of Digital Scholarship, this course will focus on relational data with structured information on historical figures, especially high officials, of early Chinese empires. Throughout the semester, we will read academic articles, mine data from primary sources, and employ Gephi and ArcGIS to visualize data. Those constructed data will cover three major themes: how geographical mobility contributed to consolidating a newly unified empire over diversified regions; how social networks served as the hidden social structure channeling the flow of power and talents; and how criminal records and excavated legal statutes shed light on the unique understanding of law and its relationship with the state in Chinese history.

 

CDT 30728 Video Art Production

Taught by Cecilia Kim

This course will use digital video and computer imaging as tools of artistic exploration and critical expression. Projects will engage creative and unconventional methods of moving image production, involving techniques and concepts in sound, animation, projection mapping, and personal storytelling. Students will be introduced to a range of video artists and artworks, using these as examples of the wide range of processes and conceptual framework in video art.

 

CDT 30750 Generative AI in the Wild

Taught by Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal and John Behrens

Generative AI is a form of computing in which computer systems generate media such as text, images, sound, video, or combinations based on prompts or other information provided to the computer. These systems, including, but are not limited to, ChatGPT, Midjourney & DALLE, have been evolving rapidly and have led to extreme excitement, confusion, and fear. This course provides a survey of how to understand and use a number of these tools including explorations in prompt engineering as well as addressing issues from across the liberal arts including artistic, economic, social/psychological, educational and legal concerns and opportunities.

 

CDT 30797 Internet Ethics

Taught by Cody Turner

This course explores ethical issues posed by the internet and online communication systems. The primary aim of the course is to identify ethical issues related to the internet and reason through different engineering, design, and policy solutions. Students will be introduced to standard normative ethical theories to provide them with a solid theoretical grounding that they can use to better understand and make sense of the applied ethical topics that will be the focus of the course. Topics covered include (but are not limited to) internet censorship, surveillance capitalism, echo chambers, fake news, online shaming, online anonymity, the digital divide, the right to be forgotten, the ethics of hacking, the metaverse, and intellectual property rights in the digital age. By the end of the course, students should be able to analyze and evaluate philosophical arguments well as write formal philosophical essays.

 

Periodically Taught Fall Course Descriptions

Course options WITH computational/digital focus:

CDT 30305 Decolonizing Gaming

Taught by Ashlee Bird

This course aims to change the way you think not only about the way that we play games, but also about the way that video games teach their players to behave within their digital worlds. This course will encourage students to reflect on and utilize their lived experiences as players, and utilize these experiences to locate themselves within their analysis and writing as well as their design practices. This course will undertake an intensive, interdisciplinary focus on the history of video game development, representation in video games, and the languages that digital games work in as well as decolonial theory and diverse theories of design. This class will engage with a variety of scholarly texts, video games, media posts, videos, and design exercises, in order to illustrate the ways in which video games have shaped the ways we play, think, and behave within their spaces. Students will be required to write and design around these lessons and address and push back against the problematic behaviors and colonial narratives around violence, race, gender, sexuality, and relationship to the land that these gamic languages and lessons have created.

 

CDT 30665 Football in America

Taught by Katherine Walden

Football is one of the most enduringly popular and significant cultural activities in the United States. Since the late 19th century, football has occupied an important place for those wishing to define and understand "America." And Notre Dame football plays a central role in that story, with larger-than-life figures and stories, from Knute Rockne's "Win one for the Gipper" line to the "Four Horsemen" backfield that led the program to a second national championship in 1924. The mythic proportions of the University's football program cast a long shadow on the institution's history, cultural significance, and traditions. This course focuses on Notre Dame football history as an entry point into larger questions about the cultural, historical, and social significance of football in the U.S. Who has been allowed to play on what terms? How have events from Notre Dame football's past been remembered and re-imagined? How has success in Notre Dame football been defined and redefined? In particular, the course will focus on how Notre Dame football became a touchstone for Catholic communities and institutions across the country navigating the fraught terrain of immigration, whiteness, and religious practice. This course will take up those questions through significant engagement with University Archive collections related to Notre Dame football, working with digitized materials to think about questions relating to access and discovery of physical and electronic collections. This course will include hands-on work with metadata, encoding and markup, digitization, and digital preservation/access through a collaboration with the University Archives and the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship. Readings for this course will include chapters from texts such as Murray Sperber's Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football (1993), TriStar Pictures' Rudy (1993), Steve Delsohn's Talking Irish: The Oral History of Notre Dame Football (2001), Jerry Barca's Unbeatable: Notre Dame's 1988 Championship and the Last Great College Football Season (2014), David Roediger's Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White (2005), David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991), and Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White (1995). Class meetings will be split between discussions of conceptual readings and applied work with library and information science technologies and systems. Coursework may include response papers, hands-on work with data, and a final project. Familiarity with archival methods, library/information science, data science, or computer science tools and methods is NOT a prerequisite for this course.