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| Semester | fall semester 2020 |
| Course frequency | Once only |
| Lecturers | Maria Eriksson (maria.eriksson@unibas.ch, Assessor) |
| Content | HISTORY AND THEORY OF INFORMATION FILTERS This seminar explores historical and contemporary efforts to filter and regulate flows of information, focusing on both manual and automated efforts to sort, clean, and govern communication. The seminar highlights how information filters work on a practical and hands-on level, but also provides opportunities to reflect on the political dimensions of attempts to separate signals from noise and pure/dangerous messages. The seminar literature sheds light on filtering logics from a broad range of perspectives, stretching from state censorship in the colonial British Empire (Darnton, 2014), the history of spies and central intelligence bureaus in early modern Venice (Iordanou, 2016), historical efforts to purify spoken language and its connection to urban sanitation projects (Laporte, 2000), and struggles to industrialize the filtering of news around the turn of the 20th century (Popp, 2014). These readings will also be paired with discussions concerning contemporary filtering techniques, such as spam filters (Parikka and Sampson, 2009), search engine filtering (Elmer, 2009), ‘smart’ noise-cancellation devices (Hagood, 2019), and efforts to remove violent and obscene content from social media (Gillespie, 2018; Roberts, 2019). What is an information filter? How does information filters work? And what fantasies of informational purity and order does different filtering efforts promote? |
| Bibliography | • Darnton R (2014) Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature. London: The British Library. • Elmer G (2009) Robots.txt: The Politics of Search Engine Exclusion. In: Parikka J and Sampson TD (eds) The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture. New York: Hampton Press, pp. 217–227. • Gillespie T (2018) Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. • Hagood M (2019) Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control. Sign, storage, transmission. Durham: Duke University Press. • Iordanou I (2016) What News on the Rialto? The Trade of Information and Early Modern Venice’s Centralized Intelligence Organization. Intelligence and National Security 31(3): 305–326. • Laporte D (2000) History of Shit. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. • Parikka J and Sampson TD (2009) The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture. New York: Hampton Press. • Popp RK (2014) Information, Industrialization, and the Business of Press Clippings, 1880-1925. Journal of American History 101(2): 427–453. • Roberts ST (2019) Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media. New Haven: Yale University Press. |
| Comments | Das Seminar wird in Englisch durchgeführt. The seminar will be held in English and takes place online via Zoom. |
| Admission requirements | Abgeschlossenes Basisstudium GTM. |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Use of digital media | Online course |
| Interval | Weekday | Time | Room |
|---|
No dates available. Please contact the lecturer.
| Modules |
Modul: Aufbaustudium Grundlagentheorien der Medienwissenschaft (Bachelor's degree subject: Media Studies) |
| Assessment format | continuous assessment |
| Assessment registration/deregistration | Reg.: course registration; dereg.: not required |
| Repeat examination | no repeat examination |
| Scale | Pass / Fail |
| Repeated registration | no repetition |
| Responsible faculty | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, studadmin-philhist@unibas.ch |
| Offered by | Fachbereich Medienwissenschaft |