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Black Tech Ecosystems reports on a year-long ethnographic study of low-income Black adult learners attending Clearwater Academy, a nonprofit computer code bootcamp that teaches coding literacy to help end racism and poverty. While Clearwater Academy offers pathways into a lucrative career that promotes Black social mobility and a diverse tech industry, Antonio Byrd describes a more complicated story. The core challenges of weak social-support networks, embedded cultures in tech, financial strains, and racism persistently present roadblocks to Clearwater Academy’s Black adult learners’ success. However, through this experience, Black adult learners develop new knowledge and frameworks that change their relationship with coding literacy and labor. Instead of solely focusing on learning computer programming for work, Black Tech Ecosystems describes a liberatory and transformative use of computer programming that centers Black lives instead of the tech industry.

The first book to intervene in debates on computation in the digital humanities

Bringing together leading experts from across North America and Europe, Computational Humanities redirects debates around computation and humanities digital scholarship from dualistic arguments to nuanced discourse centered around theories of knowledge and power. This volume is organized around four questions: Why or why not pursue computational humanities? How do we engage in computational humanities? What can we study using these methods? Who are the stakeholders?

Recent advances in technologies for image and sound processing have expanded computational approaches to cultural forms beyond text, and new forms of data, from listservs and code repositories to tweets and other social media content, have enlivened debates about what counts as digital humanities scholarship. Providing case studies of collaborations between humanities-centered and computation-centered researchers, this volume highlights both opportunities and frictions, showing that data and computation are as much about power, prestige, and precarity as they are about p-values.

Contributors: Mark Algee-Hewitt, Stanford U; David Bamman, U of California, Berkeley; Kaspar Beelen, U of London; Peter Bell, Philipps U of Marburg; Tobias Blanke, U of Amsterdam; Julia Damerow, Arizona State U; Quinn Dombrowski, Stanford U; Crystal Nicole Eddins, U of Pittsburgh; Abraham Gibson, U of Texas at San Antonio; Tassie Gniady; Crystal Hall, Bowdoin College; Vanessa M. Holden, U of Kentucky; David Kloster, Indiana U; Manfred D. Laubichler, Arizona State U; Katherine McDonough, Lancaster U; Barbara McGillivray, King’s College London; Megan Meredith-Lobay, Simon Fraser U; Federico Nanni, Alan Turing Institute; Fabian Offert, U of California, Santa Barbara; Hannah Ringler, Illinois Institute of Technology; Roopika Risam, Dartmouth College; Joshua D. Rothman, U of Alabama; Benjamin M. Schmidt; Lisa Tagliaferri, Rutgers U; Jeffrey Tharsen, U of Chicago; Marieke van Erp, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; Lee Zickel, Case Western Reserve U.

How digital humanities can shape and be shaped by the infrastructures that sustain our world

Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities reimagines the digital humanities (DH) through the expanding field of critical infrastructure studies. Featuring voices from around the globe, this volume explores how DH builds on and extends theories and technologies of infrastructure that affect society, culture, and knowledge in different national and regional contexts. Examining DH’s own infrastructural genealogy, the contributors offer readers critical reflections and bold visions for the future as they address issues of environmentalism, decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty, multilingualism, labor justice, feminism, national development, and beyond from a variety of disciplinary perspectives embedded in concrete digital systems. Including innovative “infrastructure manifests,” the essays in this book illuminate how DH can both study and shape the systems that sustain culture, scholarship, and connection.

Contributors: Anne Beaulieu, U of Groningen; Kyle Booten, U of Connecticut; Ann Borda, U of Melbourne; Susan Brown, U of Guelph; Toby Burrows, U of Western Australia; Ashley Caranto Morford, Weber State U; Javier Cha, U of Hong Kong; Jing Chen, Nanjing U; Arianna Ciula, King’s College London; Maya Dodd, FLAME U, Pune, India; Martin Paul Eve, Birkbeck, U of London; Allan Gomez, Philly Community Wireless; Matthew N. Hannah, Purdue U; Matthew Hockenberry, Fordham U; Arun Jacob, U of Toronto; Mike Jones, U of Tasmania; Lucie Kolb, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW; Ian M. Miller, St. John’s U, New York; Sylvia K. Miller, Duke U; Sarah Montoya, Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow; Saumyaa Naidu, independent researcher; Sharika Parmar, FLAME U, Pune, India; Kush Patel, Srishti Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Bengaluru; Miriam Posner, UCLA; Puthiya Purayil Sneha, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad; Paul Spence, King’s College London; Lik Hang Tsui, City U of Hong Kong; Deb Verhoeven, U of Alberta; Miguel Vieira, King’s College London; Devren Washington, Philly Community Wireless; Alex Wermer-Colan, Temple U and Philly Community Wireless; Darren Wershler, Concordia U; Grant Wythoff, Princeton U and Philly Community Wireless.

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Evaluating skills and knowledge capture lies at the cutting edge of contemporary higher education where there is a drive towards increasing evaluation of classroom performance and use of digital technologies in pedagogy. Developing Educators for the Digital Age is a book that provides a narrative account of teacher development geared towards the further usage of technologies (including iPads, MOOCs and whiteboards) in the classroom presented via the histories and observation of a diverse group of teachers engaged in the multiple dimensions of their profession.

Drawing on the insights of a variety of educational theories and approaches (including TPACK) it presents a practical framework for capturing knowledge in action of these English language teachers – in their own voices – indicating how such methods, processes and experiences shed light more widely on related contexts within HE and may be transferable to other situations.

This book will be of interest to the growing body of scholars interested in TPACK theory, or communities of practice theory and more widely anyone concerned with how new pedagogical skills and knowledge with technology may be incorporated in better practice and concrete instances of teaching.

"Today there is massive interest in how digital tools and popular culture are transforming learning out of school and lots of dismay at how digitally lost our schools are. Jabari Mahiri works his usual magic and here shows us how to cross this divide in a solidly grounded and beautifully written book."
---James Paul Gee, Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Arizona State University

"Digital Tools in Urban Schools is a profoundly sobering yet inspiring depiction of the potential for committed educators to change the lives of urban youth, with the assistance of a new set of technical capabilities."
---Mimi Ito, Professor in Residence and MacArthur Foundation Chair in Digital Media and Learning, Departments of Informatics and Anthropology, University of California, Irvine

"An uplifting book that addresses a critical gap in existing literature by providing rich and important insights into ways teachers, administrators, and members of the wider community can work together with students previously alienated---even excluded---from formal education to enhance classroom learning with appropriate digital tools and achieve inspiring results under challenging circumstances."
---Colin Lankshear, James Cook University, and Michele Knobel, Montclair State University

Digital Tools in Urban Schools demonstrates significant ways in which high school teachers in the complex educational setting of an urban public high school in northern California extended their own professional learning to revitalize learning in their classrooms. Through a novel research collaboration between a university and this public school, these teachers were supported and guided in developing the skills necessary to take greater advantage of new media and new information sources to increase student learning while making connections to their relevant experiences and interests. Jabari Mahiri draws on extensive qualitative data---including blogs, podcasts, and other digital media---to document, describe, and analyze how the learning of both students and teachers was dramatically transformed as they utilized digital media in their classrooms. Digital Tools in Urban Schools will interest instructional leaders and participants in teacher preparation and professional development programs, education and social science researchers and scholars, graduate and undergraduate programs and classes emphasizing literacy and learning, and those focused on urban education issues and conditions.

Why AI offers a chance for the humanities to strengthen their relevance and significance

If humanistic research consists of the generation of consensus positions, simple expression, summarized texts, or passable translations, then we have arrived at the place where AI is able to accomplish these different missions to a convincing degree. However, Laurent Dubreuil argues, such tasks do not, in any way, constitute the humanities. On the contrary, he posits, a maximalist take on scholarship would not focus on generation but on creation, as a subject and as an object. Dubreuil seizes the opportunity of what AI reveals about the meaning of humanistic inquiry to offer a path for the renewal of the humanities on transhistorical, transcultural, and transdisciplinary grounds.

Exploring the influence of AI technologies on theories of reason, cognition, learning, and education

Learning Under Algorithmic Conditions presents twenty-seven concise essays that collectively chart the shifting terrain of learning in the age of artificial intelligence. Providing historical and philosophical context, this innovative volume features prominent scholars from the fields of media studies, philosophy, and education research, who shed light on how learning has become newly envisioned, machinic, and more-than-human. The contributors unravel various histories of machine intelligence and elucidate the current impact of machine learning technologies on practices of knowledge production. Teeming with theoretical and practical insights, Learning Under Algorithmic Conditions is an interdisciplinary guide for those working across the humanities and social sciences as well as anyone interested in understanding our changing social, political, and technical infrastructures.

Contributors: Craig Carson, Adelphi U; Felicity Coleman, U of the Arts London; Ed Dieterle; Shayan Doroudi, U of California, Irvine; David Gauthier, Utrecht U; Cathrine Hasse, Aarhus U; Talha Can İşsevenler, CUNY; Goda Klumbytė; Robb Lindgren, U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Michael Madiao; Henry Neim Osman; Luciana Parisi, Duke U; Carolyn Pedwell, Lancaster U; Arkady Plotnitsky, Purdue U; Julian Quiros, U of Pennsylvania; Sina Rismanchian; Warren Sack, U of California, Santa Cruz; R. Joshua Scannell, The New School; Gregory J. Seigworth, Millersville U; Rebecca Uliasz, U of Michigan; David Wagner, U of New Brunswick; Ben Williamson, U of Edinburgh.

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Exploring how Black youth are reshaping game design to dismantle stereotypes and spark social change 

In the early 2000s, digital gaming rose to cultural and economic prominence. Communities of color, however, and especially Black youth, were largely excluded from gaming culture. The rare Black character in games tended to reinforce stereotypes, while racial bias was often surreptitiously embedded in game design platforms—what decolonial scholars call “whitestream” computing. Progressive game design education initiatives and new technologies have recently begun to dismantle these barriers. Yet, because biases remain, historically excluded young people still need to actively reconfigure these digital spaces to fully develop and convey their own perspectives. 

In Meta-Tuning Justice, digital rhetoric scholar Laquana Cooke explores how Black youth express cultural identity and challenge dominant narratives through innovative game design. Cooke introduces the Transformative Constructionist Learning (TCL) paradigm and its core theory of “meta-tuning”—the idea that students are better able to adjust to new challenges through trial-and-error and experimentation in educational environments that correspondingly adjust to their evolving learning needs. In contrast to traditional education practices, which assume the neutrality of technology, Cooke approaches it as a tool for social transformation. Drawing on the TCL paradigm, she explores how the unique cultural algorithms and expressions (like popping and locking dance forms) that inform the programming and designs of Black youth represent a powerful form of resistance and creation. 

Through rich ethnographic case studies across multiple educational settings, and with gaming as its experimental center, this book presents a compelling vision of how TCL and meta-tuning can help make technologies more equitable. Cooke’s innovative study offers insights crucial to scholars and practitioners in game studies, Science and Technology Studies, STEM education, and racial equity in digital learning. 

Human minds are made of memories, and today those memories have competition. Biological memory capacities are being supplanted, or at least supplemented, by digital ones, as we rely on recording—phone cameras, digital video, speech-to-text—to capture information we’ll need in the future and then rely on those stored recordings to know what happened in the past. Search engines have taken over not only traditional reference materials but also the knowledge base that used to be encoded in our own brains. Google remembers, so we don’t have to. And when we don’t have to, we no longer can. Or can we?

Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology offers concise, nontechnical explanations of major principles of memory and attention—concepts that all teachers should know and that can inform how technology is used in their classes. Teachers will come away with a new appreciation of the importance of memory for learning, useful ideas for handling and discussing technology with their students, and an understanding of how memory is changing in our technology-saturated world.
 

What kind of university is possible when digital tools are not taken for granted, but hacked for a more experimental future?

The global pandemic has underscored contemporary reliance on digital environments. This is particularly true among schools and universities, which, in response, shifted much of their instruction online. Because the rise of e-learning logics, ed-tech industries, and enterprise learning-management systems all threaten to further commodify and instrumentalize higher education, these technologies and platforms have to be creatively and critically struggled over. 

Studious Drift intervenes in this struggle by reviving the relationship between studying and the generative space of the studio in service of advancing educational experimentation for a world where digital tools have become a permanent part of education. Drawing on Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics, the “science of imaginary solutions,” this book reveals how the studio is a space-time machine capable of traveling beyond the limits of conventional online learning to redefine education as interdisciplinary, experimental, public study. 

An indispensable guide for telling fact from fiction on the internet—often in less than 30 seconds.

The internet brings information to our fingertips almost instantly. The result is that we often jump to thinking too fast, without taking a few moments to verify the source before engaging with a claim or viral piece of media. Information literacy expert Mike Caulfield and educational researcher Sam Wineburg are here to enable us to take a moment for due diligence with this informative, approachable guide to the internet. With this illustrated tool kit, you will learn to identify red flags, get quick context, and make better use of common websites like Google and Wikipedia that can help and hinder in equal measure.
 
This how-to guide will teach you how to use the web to verify the web, quickly and efficiently, including how to
•     Verify news stories and other events in as little as thirty seconds (seriously)
•     Determine if the article you’re citing is by a reputable scholar or a quack
•     Detect the slippery tactics scammers use to make their sites look credible
•     Decide in a minute if that shocking video is truly shocking
•     Deduce who’s behind a site—even when its ownership is cleverly disguised
•     Uncover if that feature story is actually a piece planted by a foreign government
•     Use Wikipedia wisely to gain a foothold on new topics and leads for digging deeper

And so much more. Building on techniques like SIFT and lateral reading, Verified will help students and anyone else looking to get a handle on the internet’s endless flood of information through quick, practical, and accessible steps.