The proposed course will compare the traditions, theories, and perspectives of LAMs, focusing on: • the evolution of LAMS from the early modern period to the present day; • key concepts of library science, archival studies and museum studies; • professional ethics and values across LAMs; • representation and interpretation across LAMs • user engagement and meaning-making across LAMs; • LAMs as physical and virtual spaces; • collaboration and convergence across LAMs; • the repositioning of LAMs as agents of social change in general and in response to the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in particular.

Discussion of archival theories and methods of acquiring, appraising, arranging, describing, making accessible, and promoting the records of individuals and communities. Analysis of traditional and innovative archival theory and methodology will be grounded in an examination of the unique nature of personal records by studying personal recordkeeping practices, engaging with theories of self-representation, and considering how personal records are used by archival researchers.

Information for and about those considered to be on the margins of the “mainstream” is (and is not) made accessible based on certain assumptions. Such perspectives reinforce difference, “disability”, and further disempowerment of an individual or group.

From Tinder to Task Rabbit, students will come to understand the co-constitutive relationship between gender and technology. Students will be introduced to a wide array of texts that fall under the category of Feminist Technology Studies. The course focuses explicitly on how the materiality of technology intersects with and structures gendered power dynamics.

In a fast-moving business world, User Experience (UX) leadership and influence are necessary skills for UX professionals to be successful. UX leaders advocate for user-centered design practices, infuse this into the culture of an organization, and drive business by user needs and design mandates. In addition to cultural leadership, the UX leader needs to work closely with other stakeholders – including users, product owners, managers, engineers, and experts/specialists in other disciplines – to set up best UX delivery practices, design operations, and agile methodologies to ensure effective design and delivery of excellent end-to-end user experiences.

This course introduces students to essential UX leadership skills, provides opportunities to develop and hone those skills, and builds awareness of the expectations for exemplary UX leadership. Studio-based learning and discussions of strategies for understanding the tenets of UX leadership will be employed. Each student will examine and demonstrate the applications of UX leadership via lectures, individual assignments, and a major group design project. Students will then learn how to communicate the value of UX to executives, as well as how to recognize business challenges that can be turned into UX opportunities and successes. An emphasis will be placed on the application of both UX best practices – including design thinking, user research, and agile development – and personal skills relating to influence, like empathy, awareness, storytelling, and persuasion.

This course can be used to fulfil the "Managerial" Professional Requirement.

The course is designed to help students understand the opportunities and tensions in designing for individuals and communities in different cultures and geographies. In recent times, technology companies are looking to push their products to new markets as well as design new products for communities around the globe. There have also been discussions on the ethical responsibilities of technology companies as well as the values built into designed technologies. This course will critically examine the social impact of technologies around the world, especially in developing contexts. It will provide students with necessary exposure to historical and contemporary issues in global development, and how they relate to the design of technologies. The course will prepare the students for a work environment that increasingly demands an awareness of the cultural, social, and political issues related to designing and implementing technologies in different parts of the world. The course will draw from multiple disciplinary perspectives, including Human-Computer Interaction, Information and Communication Technology and Development (ICTD), Science and Technology Studies (STS), and development studies.

This course can be used to fulfil the "Critical Perspectives" Professional Requirement.

Modern information systems leverage distributed architecture to enhance scalability, reliability, and availability. These systems distribute components across multiple interconnected computers, while appearing as a single coherent system to end users. This course provides an in-depth understanding and insights into the evolving landscape of digital connectivity and distributed systems. The course will focus on the foundation of computer networks and the design of distributed systems including computer networks terminology, protocols, architectures, technologies, and the main principles behind designing reliable distributed systems.

Information systems need to evolve continuously to cope with the rapid changes in our society. In recent years, DevOps has gained popularity as a practice that combines development and operation teams to reduce the time needed to build and deliver high-quality systems. This course provides an overview of DevOps concepts and best practices. Concepts to be covered include the challenges of adopting DevOps for large-scale information systems, the application of Configuration Management (CM) concepts, and infrastructure management using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices. In addition, the course, (INF2206H: Adopting DevOps for Large-Scale Information Systems), will address the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to manage IT Operations (i.e., AIOps) of information systems.

Responsible Artificial Intelligence (RAI) is about ensuring that socioenvironmental responsibility is a fundamental and permeating consideration in all stages (conception, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, etc.) of AI development and governance. This is necessary to address and prevent harms and injustices, setting the course of AI development in a direction of sustainable benefit to our interconnected world. RAI requires a thoughtful and pragmatic synthesis of approaches from wide-ranging fields. The goal of this course is to equip students with the qualitative, quantitative, critical, reflective, and practical tools to bridge the gap between theory and practice, in order to make responsible AI a reality.

The course covers an evolving set of relevant topics such as user studies, participatory design, statistical significance testing, model comparison, generalization, randomized control trials, bias, interpretability and explainability, FAccT (fairness, accountability, transparency), equity, ethics, safety, alignment, robustness, scientific communication, stakeholder consultations, data governance, power and exploitation, digital labour, peer review, reliability engineering, information security, privacy, verification, auditing, reproducibility, red-teaming, unit-testing, sandboxing, scenario planning, risk, and impact analysis.

Topic models have emerged as a powerful methodological approach in human-centered data science since they lie at the intersection of empirical, positivist and interpretive techniques. Data scientists like topic models because they can provide sophisticated insights about large amounts of text data by incorporating human context and knowledge. This course will provide students with the computational ability to uncover latent topics from text documents and use qualitative, thematic analysis to make sense of them.

This course can be used to fulfil the "Technical" Professional Requirement.

After the examination of many technical aspects of algorithms, from design to implementation, this course will examine principles that need to be followed in order to ensure that human values and ethics are preserved.

This course can be used to fulfil the "Professional Values" Requirement.

This trans-disciplinary course aims to provide students with a conceptual toolset to bridge disciplinary modes of thinking. It introduces systems thinking frameworks as mental devices to illuminate and critically interrogate key concepts, assumptions, frameworks, and modes of engagement. Through these frameworks, it explores the multi-faceted nature of sustainability and the role of information systems and technology design in addressing it. Students will explore and contrast so-called hard, soft, and critical systems thinking approaches and their historical evolution. We use systems thinking games, collaborative modelling, and case studies to explore the role of systems design in social, environmental, and economic sustainability and we discuss roles and responsibilities for information professionals in this space.

This comprehensive course explores big data technologies, NoSQL database systems, and their practical applications in modern data-driven environments. Students will learn about distributed computing, various NoSQL database types, and big data processing frameworks.

The course combines theoretical concepts with hands-on experience using recognized industry-standard tools and technologies.

This course provides an in-depth exploration of generative AI techniques and their applications in music composition. Students will learn foundational and advanced concepts, including Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Transformers, and neural network architectures. Through hands-on projects using open-source libraries, students will train and evaluate AI models for music generation. The course emphasizes creativity, critical thinking, and technical proficiency, equipping students with the skills to innovate at the intersection of AI and music.

The rapid growth of real-time data generated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices, social media, financial systems, and other digital interactions has transformed how organizations make decisions. Streaming Data Analytics is an advanced course designed to equip students with the knowledge and skills to process, analyze, and extract actionable insights from continuous data streams.

Students will gain a deep understanding of the key concepts such as stream processing architectures, windowing, scalability, and stateful processing. This course also emphasizes hands-on practice, enabling students to apply these concepts to design scalable, fault-tolerant streaming data pipelines.

This course explores the integration of data analytics into the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of public policies. The course examines key concepts in data science, statistical modeling, and machine learning, and how these tools can be leveraged to inform decision-making processes in the government and public sector.

Students will learn how to analyze large datasets, interpret trends, and apply evidence-based methods to solve complex societal challenges, such as child welfare, healthcare access, immigration, and housing.

The course also addresses ethical considerations, data privacy, and the challenges of translating quantitative insights into actionable policy recommendations. Through case studies and hands-on projects, students will develop the skills necessary to navigate the intersection of data, technology, and public administration.

Over two decades humans have increasingly recognized that data created by researchers and governments are a public good and have recurring value when these data are made broadly accessible. This has been encapsulated in the concept of Open Data. Open Data, whether produced as the result of governmental initiatives or research projects, are data that are released (made accessible) for redistribution, reuse, remixing, and reanalysis. This course provides students an opportunity to develop a functional knowledge of the open data concept in the context of government open data and research open data. In the case of research data, the release of these data are essential to facilitate the reproducibility, transparency, and verification of scientific studies. They also can become foundational resources for innovation and new discoveries.

In the case of government open data, when effectively used these data enable citizens to tap public information resources which can empower citizens to contribute to social activism through using the analysis of data to underpin the questioning of public policy, to create new information services, and even to produce economic value and establish new businesses. The abilities to navigate critically the open data landscape to discover, assess, analyze, remix, and re-distribute these data are highly relevant for information professionals.

In this course students will develop an understanding as to how to use open data personally and professionally and to support others to use it for a variety of purposes from, for instance, in the case of open research data validating or questioning research findings to in the case of open government data to enabling social activism.

This course can be used to fulfil the "Technical" Professional Requirement.

This course provides an introduction to the field of theoretical writing addressing the nature of digital media and the role of technology in modern and contemporary culture. In doing so, this course will consider a range of critical pressure points that have been central to media studies, technology studies, digital humanities, art and performance, cinema studies, and archival studies. How have developments in digital culture and theory impacted the critical commonplaces of analogy, time, space, sound, motion, network, body, and narrative? In dialogue with critical paradigms that have been fundamental to the discourse of critical theory, including affect, power, constructionism, archives, colonialism, nationalism, and the politics of race, gender, and sexuality, this course will provide students with the opportunity to scrutinize the work of a wide spectrum of thinkers central to critical theory in digital discourse.

This course will explore how and why material objects, cultural artifacts, and artistic works relate to and are transformed through technological mediation. We will examine several case studies in which elements of the analogue or natural world are digitized and presented in new screen-based forms. Throughout the course we will combine theoretical readings on the nature of materiality, the politics of digitization, and the aesthetics of digital representation with case studies of specific digital archives, collections, and organizations. Topics will include the scanning of books by mass digitization organizations like the Internet Archive and Google Books; diverse practices of curation and remediation in the museum and library sectors; technologies for digitization and remediation including 3D scanning, photography, OCR and applications of machine learning for textual transcription; specialist imaging techniques including multi-spectral imaging and micro-CT scanning; the mediation and digitization of social processes; artistic and conceptual engagements with digitization; the relationship between digitization and conservation of historical materials; and the creation of digital archives and collections. We will conclude the course by considering the role of materiality and embodiment in a highly digitized culture and the significance of material craft and the handmade alongside digital surrogates.

This course can be used to fulfil the "Technical" Professional Requirement

This course will introduce students to the methods, tools, and workflows that archivists use to process born-digital archival materials for preservation and access. Through a combination of lectures, demonstrations, readings, activities for testing and exploration, and a cumulative set of assignments using example records, students will gain hands-on experience with a suite of open source software tools used to acquire, appraise, arrange, describe, make accessible, store, and preserve digital archival materials.

Students will attain an understanding of the fundamental aspects of digital records and computing systems, build experience with the systems and infrastructures that enable and support digital archives work, apply methods for documenting workflows, and engage in current issues and debates affecting the work of digital archivists. The focus of the course will be on born-digital archival records, though issues regarding digitized archival materials will also be discussed. The course will bridge the theories and methods for archival functions taught in the required courses of the ARM concentration with the opportunities and challenges presented by working with digital records, including identifying how core principles apply or require rethinking in digital environments.

Information technology and systems are reshaping our societies. Those involved in technology design and development have a chance to work towards social justice and sustainability. But how? Despite the enormous potential of IT to make the world a better place, actual tech development practice often reinforces inequality, fossil fuel production and other unjust and unsustainable aspects of our societies. The rising refusal of tech workers to build what they consider “evil” tech is a reminder that it doesn’t have to be that way. But how can those involved in systems design exercise professional responsibility and ethical judgment? What is the room for maneuver that we have available in systems design to make the world a more just and sustainable place? And what do we need to understand about computational systems, engineering methods and social theory to make meaningful contributions and interventions in this space?

This course can be used to fulfil either the "Professional Values" Requirement or the "Critical Perspectives" Requirement.

Knowledge Translation (KT) is often considered part of the research process in health care and public health. Mainstream, institutional definitions of KT vary, but they generally involve communicating research results to different audiences and working to put "knowledge into action" through changes to practice or policy.

In this course, we explore how specific ideas about the world are embedded in mainstream research communications, with a focus on what is often termed "health equity" research. This course aims to help knowledge workers identify "red flags" (falsehoods, missing context, vague language) that often show up in mainstream health research and that serve to entrench structural white advantage and structural racism.

The purpose of this course is to provide an introduction to concepts and considerations of epistemic injustice and knowledge equity in the context of GLAM organizations. The course examines theories of epistemic injustice, particularly as it touches on the circulation of information through information spaces such as libraries and explores and teaches practices that bring knowledge equity. Theorist Miranda Fricker has described epistemic injustice as “wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” Students will critically examine the ways dominant information organization (infra)structures are sites of epistemic injustice, where frameworks of description, digital encoding, and standardized naming are used as methods of domination and oppression. Students will also engage and explore theories and mechanisms to work toward knowledge equity within GLAM organizations.

This course can be used to fulfil the "Critical Perspectives" Professional Requirement.

Cities are sites of capital accumulation and locations whereby technology finds concrete expression. As new urban interventions are needed to respond to conditions of massification, densification, mobility, global health, and environmental degradation, this seminar addresses the relation between outer space exploration and urban infrastructures. Outer space science and technology plays a central role in the design and development of urban, architectural and transportation systems, yet its impact and ubiquity often go unnoticed. Because outer space science and technology is a field that heavily relies on the tools and methodologies of information science (IS), IS specialists can play a crucial role in developing ethical frameworks for the urbanization of outer space technology.

This seminar will equip students with the tools to identify and develop practical, tactical, and speculative modes of engagement that critically assess (document, evaluate, and subvert) the impact of outer space at an urban level. Students will be introduced to key concepts, theories, and case studies in science and technology studies, architecture, urbanism, and art to reflect and speculate on the cultural, social, and political implications of an interplanetary project of inhabitation. Students will engage with how outer space is reconfiguring the ways in which we design our cities by studying urban communication and infrastructures, satellites, and drone technology as well as sites where the future of human inhabitation under extreme conditions is currently being envisioned and constructed.

This course examines the various forms of economic, cultural, and social power that are embodied through policy and policymaking in the public and private domains. Particular emphasis is placed on the various forms of capital that are concentrated in the hands of decision makers, elected bodies, and policy audiences who play a formative role in the development of policy. The course focuses on the role of information practices in instrumentalizing and operationalizing policies and their attending objectives, and how decision makers can be challenged through different modes of participation and intervention in policymaking processes.

This course can be used to fulfil the "Critical Perspectives" Professional Requirement.

The focus of this class is on evaluating and exploring current critical themes in Information Studies through both literature and hands-on work.

The course is organized around values that have been identified as key in regards to the design and implementation of socially and culturally sensitive information systems, in particular the values of privacy, autonomy, community, democracy, and social justice. Using design-based research on physical computing as an adjunct to critical scholarship in this area, we will explore how these values are expressed, debated, and resisted within the development and use of information systems.

This course can be used to fulfil either the "Technical" Professional Requirement or the "Critical Perspective" Professional Requirement.

This course prepares students for the practice of applied and formal policy research to complement future endeavours in professional practice or scholarship that intersect with public or institutional policy development. We ground our approach to methodological design in the critical fields of STS inclusive of ethnographic field studies, laboratory studies, critical discourse and rhetorical analysis, feminist science studies, social construction of technology, actor-network theory, activity theory, and organizational studies.

The course focuses on how to study policy, how to engage in critical analysis of live policy issues in the public and private domains, and how to weigh the merits of quantitative and qualitative approaches to the task at hand. We discuss the applicability of different methods, methodologies, and frameworks within the context of research design. This course may be used to satisfy the research methods requirement for the thesis pathway.

This course explores the histories of information technologies broadly defined. Drawing on current and emerging historiographical approaches, we will consider historical examples of the technologies, systems, infrastructures, and practices that have shaped the ways we collect, structure, analyze, transmit, regulate, and understand information. We will draw upon theoretical frameworks from fields such as media studies, science and technology studies, feminist technology studies, political economy, policy studies, book history, memory studies, and social and cultural history. We will also consider the connections between information technologies and forces of social change and upheaval, such as colonialism, industrialization, late capitalism, globalization, and social justice movements. Our central concern will be to understand the difference that historical knowledge can make in changing times.

This course can be used to fulfil the "Critical Perspectives" Professional Requirement.

We are told that now we are living in a platform society because digital platforms, from Amazon and Flipkart to Instagram and WeChat, shape the social life of a great majority of the global population. This course is designed to advance the knowledge about the global origin and development of the platform-turn in the intersecting fields of information studies, studies of science and technologies, management studies, and political economy of communication and media. The course provides an intellectual voyage of the global experience and expression of platform from the geography outside Anglophone where the term was first theorized in the manufacturing industry, and from the days when the concerning experiences were not yet understood through the perspective platforms as we know today to the contemporary era when we can hardly imagine an internet without digital platforms.

The course explores the global histories and practices of the platform, as well as the implications of the increasing penetration of digital platforms into the social fabric of our life on a global scale. The course will guide the students to pay special attention to how local conditions, globalization, and the geo-politics of information and knowledge production intertwine to shape and be shaped by the intellectual undertaking to theorize platform as a discourse, business model, mediation device, power relation, and organizational revolution. Students will engage with key concepts, theories, and approaches in the emerging field of platform studies, but also with some overlooked histories and local articulations of what platform is and how platform works. The course will be a discussion-oriented seminar. Discussions will revolve around history, theorization, and politics of platform through examples of different platforms beyond the digital realm and from a variety of geographies.

This course can be used to fulfil the "Critical Perspectives" Professional Requirement.

This course will give students an introduction to fundamental skills as well as introduce critical leadership and organization studies concepts and practices necessary to effectively navigate and lead in any role (e.g., team lead, chair of a committee, middle manager, administrator, etc.) within an academic library setting.

This includes knowledge about equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) as well as anti-racism and decolonization; skills in critical reflection, and ethical problem-solving. Additionally, it will provide insight into core responsibilities that leaders assume, including facilitating discussions in meeting settings, strategic planning, as well as recruitment and retention.

This course will offer practical opportunities for students to learn how to navigate and lead in academic libraries. Additionally, students will be introduced to different academic library organizational structures and have an opportunity to explore their own leadership philosophies.

This course can be used to fulfil the "Managerial" Professional Requirement.