Policy Intervention Studio is a culminating Year 2 CIPS course where students will have an opportunity to put their skills into practice by intervening in real-world policy processes. Depending on the year, interventions may occur at the municipal, provincial, federal, or international levels at such venues as Toronto City Council, Infrastructure Ontario, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or Parliamentary Standing Committees.

Students will conduct collaborative research on policy issues and actors, create and undertake consultative processes with their peers, develop and submit policy interventions and will be encouraged and supported to provide testimony in-person where possible.

Much of our world is subject to "intellectual property" laws and regulations — the books we read, the shows we watch, the tools we use, and the food we crave. How, though, are knowledge and information created? Who do they belong to? Who decides how such things happen?

This course examines historical and emerging approaches to understanding the processes by which knowledge and information become intellectual property and the regulatory processes and venues that maintain intellectual property as an epistemological norm. It foregrounds critical theories, exploring ethical, legal, and regulatory issues in information ownership faced by policymakers, users, and creators.

This is an elective course in the CIPS concentration, open to students in all programs and concentrations. The course surveys existing and emerging policy topics and controversies related to data and information collection, storage, management, and use by state and non-state actors, the privatization and platformization of public and private services, the use of generative AI and sensors in the public and private realms, and the implications of global information policy frameworks in domestic contexts.

Various issues and angles will be considered from one year to the other with guest speakers and lecturers engaging students in a breadth of issues such as intellectual property, Internet governance, identity in cyberspace, privacy, security and secrecy, e-government, misinformation and disinformation, and the role of professionals in information design and provision.

Policy is often designed after the emergence and adoption of new technologies leaving policy gaps that are increasingly difficult to fill — the case of generative AI being but one recent example. This course introduces the concept of speculative policy design, using techniques pioneered in speculative design to guide students through dreaming of future technologies, uses and kinds of data and information, through a policy lens.

How might new or emerging technologies be governed? How might we regulate in real time? Students will be encouraged to experiment with various forms of policy design through consultation, artistic intervention, and qualitative/quantitative research. While the closely linked Policy Studio course has students intervene in current policy processes, in this course they will prepare for the unknown future.

Speculative design explores the possibilities of user experience and technology design by
emphasizing imagination, inspiration, and creativity techniques. These techniques are used
by sci-fi writers, futurists, and designers to envision different design futures, such that these
futures can be explored through multiple lenses (e.g., social, technical, economic, political,
etc.).

The explorations provide a means to reason about implications of user experience and
technology designs, thereby providing foci for future research. This course will provide
students experience with speculative design techniques, and skills to interrogate the
artefacts and visions produced from these techniques, as well as direct hands-on experiences
with this type of "futuring."

Practica in selected aspects of professional work designed for advanced level students to strengthen and build on theoretical knowledge and to develop specialized skill in aspects of professional information work and environments through supervised experiential learning and seminar presentations.

This course examines the particular roles of User Experience Design (UXD) and User Experience Research (UXR) in video games and the video games industry. The course specializes in video games as interactive interfaces, introduces core video game concepts, discusses the role of UX in the video game development process, and highlights how and when core UX research methods are applicable to this unique domain. Key trends in the video game industry will be illustrated with current examples. Throughout the course, students will practice video game analysis, heuristic evaluation of video games, as well as usability, appreciation, and challenge testing using industry-standard user research tools. Inclusivity, accessibility, and making video games for everyone will be a recurring theme that reflects the current state of the industry.

As we increasingly live in a networked world, studying data that is shaped in the form of networks becomes an essential part of the toolkit of information researchers and data scientists. Social network analysis is a structural perspective to study the social world that focuses on the relationships between actors rather than the characteristics of the individuals themselves. It can be applied to a wide variety of social questions, and is used as a powerful method of research across various disciplines. The course offers a broader view of theory and applications of social network analysis, including applications to online and social media networks. We will learn how to identify influential actors within social networks, investigate community structure within networks, and test hypotheses to analyze how networked data can explain the social world. The course includes a practical component and provides hands on experience on network data collection and analysis using social network analysis existing tools.

Business processes are pervasive in our lives: in banks, telecommunication centers, web-services, and healthcare. Processes in organizations are there to make sure that the business goals are achieved in an efficient way with the highest quality of products and/or services. Business Process Management (BPM) is a research field that focuses on improving company’s performance by managing, analyzing and improving its processes. The BPM lifecycle includes (Re)Design, Modeling, Executing, Monitoring and Optimizing business processes. We shall cover the components of the lifecycle, emphasizing the data-driven aspects of BPM. The field of Business Process Management (BPM) focuses on improving an organization’s performance by managing, analyzing and improving its processes.

This course addresses issues of data and the city, looking at intersecting frameworks such as smart technology, civic engagement, and municipal policy. The aim of this course is to introduce students to a range analytical methodologies, such as Science and Technology Studies, Critical Data Studies, Critical Policy Studies, as well as applied work in Interaction Design, in order to produce a critical understanding of the complex domain called “the city.” Students will use the city of Toronto as a living lab for the course, engaging case studies, urban data, and site visits. Throughout the course, students will produce analytical writing and prototype interaction and experience design. Students are expected to participate in class discussion and produce a final project. No prior experience in the course methodologies or design technique required.

This course examines the applications of user experience design (UXD) to the disciplines of Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM). The course introduces the UXD toolbox, a series of user experience (UX) methods and tools that are applicable in GLAM workplaces. This may include UX research methods, UX evaluation methods, design thinking approaches, UX strategy techniques, user journey/experience maps, and service blueprints. The course will emphasize studio-based learning and discussions of strategies for understanding and responding to the needs of GLAM users. Each student will examine and demonstrate the applications of UXD in one GLAM discipline of their choice; students will work on two major assignments. First, an individual literature review outlining the UX applications in a GLAM discipline of their choice (e.g., a LIS student may want to conduct a literature review on UX in Libraries). These literature reviews will form the basis for class discussions. Second, a major design project in which students will work (in a group) to solve a UX related challenge in a GLAM discipline. The project will be executed with GLAM organizations across the GTA (community-engaged learning approach).

The Joy of Information introduces students to a positive Information Science by focusing upon information in contexts that are perceived as joyful, sublime, upbeat, creative, interesting, pleasurable, and fun. In doing so, it intentionally brackets and places aside information experiences associated with negative or quotidian states such as work, problems, pain, conflict, boredom, everyday routines, and unconsciousness. Participants will explore the idea that positive information phenomena have distinct qualities and are important to what Plato called eudaimonia—a flourishing life. Practically speaking, enrollees will discover how information institutions and their stakeholders may mediate and champion a positive approach to their information resources, systems, and services. The first offering of this course during Fall 2019 will be centered upon leisure, an information-rich, heterogeneous, and joyful domain. Over the course of the semester, casual leisure, serious leisure (including hobbies), project-based leisure, and devotee work (paid work that feels like leisure), will be examined for their informational patterns and distinctions.

From mobile apps to social media platforms, digital technologies are crucial factors in the evolution of contemporary work. In this course we will analyse their significance in contexts such as creative labour, student and academic work, platform economy, start-up culture, peer production, automation and work refusal, and prosumerism. The course will have a specific focus on the Italian and continental school of autonomist Marxism, including feminist political economy and grassroots approaches to precarious labour. Among others, we will read Federici, Gramsci, Lazzarato, Negri, Tronti, and Virno, as well as a number of empirical studies of digital labour. We will also watch and read relevant fiction. The main goal is to sharpen critical tools to analyse the material and ideological configurations of work in the social factory of digital capitalism.

In 2018, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had profiled 80 million Facebook users and arguably used these profiles to influence their political decision-making in the US presidential elections and the Brexit vote. While Facebook’s data practices and the potential for influencing targeted users became as a surprise for many, critical studies of social media have highlighted for almost a decade now that social media sites are not neutral playgrounds for its users. Rather, social media sites are designed for the purposes of influencing users, monetizing their connections, and providing value for the owners of the site. To elaborate the complexity of our social media relations, the course draws on different phenomenological and material approaches of media theory. In specific, the course brings together some of the core themes of contemporary social media studies focusing on recent books that introduce critical approaches. Critical in this context does not mean positioning social media as something negative but rather it is an approach that investigates social media through its continuities and breaks, challenges corporate definitions of social media bringing the world closer together, and provides tools to analyze the logics according to which social media sites function and individuals are positioned as user subjectivities.

This course examines the socio-cultural, political, policy and commercial aspects of privacy and information and communication technology in the Canadian and global context. The interdisciplinary course will explore topics including: privacy theory (histories of privacy and technology, various dimensions of privacy, evolving conceptions of reasonable expectations of privacy); regulation (the role of data protection authorities, privacy organizations and civil society, privacy legislation, select case law); challenges to individual and collective privacy rights with intense datafication; and digital privacy policy literacy.

Data science is a fast-growing field and new tools and techniques are designed everyday to perform data analysis in quick and robust ways. This course covers the fundamentals of data science using the R language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. R is currently widely used by information students and data scientists from various disciplines. The course will teach students how to do data science in an easy way. It is designed for students from the social sciences and from non-programming backgrounds. We will learn skills of data collection, storage, cleaning, transformation, visualization, and various techniques of data analysis. We will apply those techniques to analyze structured tabular data and unstructured text data through experimenting on real datasets, including online data. This course will provide students with a new skill highly in demand in the information and data sciences job markets.

Designing UX for Mixed Reality Systems

This course explores the worlds of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality applications, and prepares students with user experience design techniques to prototype, evaluate, and critique these systems. The course focuses on core mixed reality mechanics — including tablet, head-mounted, and projected augmented reality, embodied interaction techniques — and provides students with an understanding of the design implications of these approaches for mixed reality UX. Students will explore prototyping methods for designing mixed reality applications, and study evaluation techniques for these applications. The course will also take a critical perspective on mixed reality applications, particularly their potential impact on social practices, culture, and society. 

The purpose and content of this course is to provide an introduction to the world of audiovisual documents (photographs, sound recordings, moving images). This includes their history, physical makeup, stages of creation, appraisal, acquisition, arrangement and description and preservation. As well there will be a brief introduction to copyright as well as the licensing and distribution ramifications of using, exhibiting, and re-purposing AV documents. By focusing on the above knowledge set, the course will reveal how important they are in research terms both as an adjunct to other types of documents and in their own right. This exposure will make it evident that audiovisual documents deserve to be given the fullest consideration in archival and library management decision-making, as much as any other types of documents.

There will also be an examination and critical review of examples of specialized audiovisual scholarship in the form of virtual exhibitions, illustrated and multiple-media books, DVD and CD box sets. The skills and knowledge to be taken away by the student include both the theoretical knowledge described above, as well as hands-on experience working with and assessing an actual audiovisual archival collection.

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

Art and design research has been revitalized by the revisionist impulse of visual culture analysis, which seeks to embed creativity within sociological and historical contexts. In response, art librarians must empower users to explore inter-disciplinary search tools that explore traditional aesthetic literature in relation to cultural studies.

This course covers an introduction to an emerging field called service science. Service science brings together multiple disciplines (computer science, marketing, operations research, information systems, engineering, etc.) to study service systems. Service systems are complex systems that vary in scope (from people to businesses, organizations, governments, and nations) and involve people, information, organizations, and technology adapting dynamically and connecting internally and externally to other service systems through value propositions. In all types of service systems, value is realized through interactions with other service systems.
Technology is often used to support and enable these interactions. This course is intended to help prepare students for successful careers in the information professions where much of the work is service based. The course is designed to build an understanding of the main theories and concepts of service science and to help students apply those theories to better understand, design, and innovate within service systems.

This course will introduce students to the foundations of evaluation, including using the logic model, program evaluation, data gathering, analysis and reporting. Examples of evaluation in a variety of information environments will be explored, including libraries, archives and museums as well as how evaluation is applied and practiced in information systems and design and user experience design. This course will provide students with a new skill highly in demand in the information and data sciences job markets.

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

From mobile apps to algorithms and robots, digital technologies are crucial factors in the evolution of contemporary work. In this course we analyse their broad impact and significance across many industries, from creative labour and academic work to the platform economy and manufacturing. The course is based on labour theory, feminist political economy, as well as grassroots and Autonomist approaches to work. We also watch and read relevant fiction. The main goal is to sharpen critical tools to analyse the material and ideological configurations of work in the social factory of digital capitalism.

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

A reciprocal flow of information is critical for social integration in a society comprised of multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual communities. This course critically examines theoretical and policy debates in multiculturalism and media studies with respect to social integration. The course focuses on the role of media in production, distribution, and consumption of information, and the structural and organizational challenges and opportunities for facilitating a reciprocal flow of information for reciprocal social integration. Topics include the public sphere, cultural literacy, communication infrastructure, an intercultural media system, mainstream and diasporic media practices, and emerging models on digital platforms.

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

Remix encapsulates the confluence of critical thinking and creativity in cultural production in particular and in creative endeavors more generally. This course enables students to examine the place of remix in contemporary society against the backdrop of legal constraints, moral and cultural challenges, political and economic vested interests, and the rise of participatory culture and remix as socially embedded behaviour. Remix practices involve finding inspiration in what has already been created and then deconstructing, transforming, contrasting, re-using, reconstituting and combining media to produce novel creative outputs that deliver new value. It happens both in physical and virtual environments. The practice is endemic in contemporary culture. We see it now in many forms of art from assemblages to video art, in data construction, in film and video, animation, games, genetic engineering, food, and many other aspects of our culture. Remix is not a new behaviour, it has a long history— for many its ubiquitousness in music production (e.g., hip hop) beginning in the 1980s was a key awareness point, but we have long seen its presence in architecture (e.g., spolia), art (e.g., cubism, collage, “readymades”), film, literature, and music. It has become a cornerstone of our participatory culture and a core information practice. What is different is that the virtual has made the processes of production more accessible to a broader audience and made it possible to distribute the results of remix activities effortlessly. At the same time content which appears to many as source material to inspire collective creativity is subject to vigorous efforts to lock it down as intellectual property. There are many perspectives, for instance, remix practices juxtaposes piracy against these restrictive practices. Remix raises questions about intellectual property rights (IPR), authorship, the collective, what creativity is and where its boundaries lie, what is novel, innovative and original, and the very nature of the producer-consumer. We will view remix through multiple lens some historical, some social, some political and others economic. Remix lies at the juncture of People-Content-Technology and this course investigates remix from the vantage of the field of Information and sets remix within the context of digital culture more generally.

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

Digital Culture introduces students to shared cultural forms online, including community formation, self-presentation, communication and language, and rituals and celebration. The course draws on a range of socio-cultural approaches to the study of digital culture, such as postcolonialism, critical race theory, queer and feminist theory, actor-network theory, cultural materialism, media archaeology, political economy, structuralism, and post-structuralism. The course will also consider the plurality of what “digital culture” can mean, including digital cultures outside of North America, particularly in the Global South, and the relationships between online and offline worlds. Students will gain a nuanced understanding of the historical landscape that led to the emergence of digital culture within the Internet age, with a particular emphasis on the experiences and contributions of marginalized communities. Integrating theoretical perspectives and relevant methodologies, this course will equip students with a toolkit for studying and interpreting digital culture in a changing world.

This course explores the causes, experiences, and consequences of misinformation, and the role played by expertise and experts in defining its boundaries. This course challenges the view that there is an objective basis for determining what is misinformation. One person's hero may legitimately be another person's villain.

This course addresses three topic areas: a) individuals' ways of knowing (psychology of misinformation); b) social construction of experts and expertise (sociology of misinformation); c) ways to navigate expertise in a "post-truth" world (critical information literacy).

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

The course focuses on identifying and understanding what is “informational” in any setting. Students will develop sharpened vision to discern informational patterns, that is, an ability to trace what Bates (1999) calls the “red thread” of information pervading life. To this end, the course involves a fusion of information theory and ethnographic method that is then applied by each student to an independent Research Project. Theories, models, and concepts will be introduced from the literature of Information Seeking and Use (ISU). Students will learn the fundamentals of ethnographic research. Featured Contexts will be profiled and considered as exemplar information experiences in context. As the semester unfolds, students will refine their observational and analytical skills through an exploratory, ethnographic Research Project about the information experience within a context of personal interest or career relevance.

This course considers the history and possible futures of books in a digital world. In this course “the book” is interpreted broadly, meaning not just an object with covers and pages, but also an evolving metaphor for conceptual frameworks for knowledge, and a metonym that brings together many different technologies, institutions, and cultural practices. The course introduces students to interdisciplinary approaches such as book history, textual studies, history of reading, and digital humanities, with an emphasis on balancing theoretical speculation with practical implementation. Readings will survey topics such as the ontology of born-digital artifacts, critical assessment of digitization projects, collaborative knowledge work, reading devices (old and new), e-book interface design, text/image/multimedia relationships, theories and practices of markup, the gendering of technologies, the politics of digital archiving, the materiality of texts, and the epistemology of digital tools. Students will also receive a practical introduction to XML markup and visualization tools.

Information behaviour is the currently preferred term used to describe the many ways in which human beings interact with information, in particular the ways in which people seek and utilize information (Bates, 2010). An understanding of information behaviour is central to work in the information professions and knowledge-based industries. For more than 75 years information behaviour research has been conducted in the field of library and information studies.