Read
- Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, Chapters 6-8
Methods Discussion: Photo Documentation of Cognitive Activity
- Activity: Photo Documentation Project (due in class)
Distributed Cognition III – 2/26
2
Author Archives: Matthew J. Brown
Distributed Cognition II – 2/19
Read
- Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, Chapters 4-5
- For the perplexed: Edwin Hutchins, “Cognition, Distributed,” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences.
Methods Discussion: Cognitive Ethnography I
- Read:
- Ed Hutchins, Digital Ethnography Workbench Manifesto
- Charles Goodwin, Professional Vision
- Activity: Start Photo Documentation Project
Distributed Cognition I – 2/12
Read
- Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, Introduction, Chapters 1-3
- For the perplexed: Edwin Hutchins, “Cognition, Distributed,” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences.
Methods Discussion: Human Subjects, Ethics, & the IRB
- Complete NIH Protecting Human Research Subjects training.
- Presentation on the Institutional Review Board by Sanaz Okhovat, Senior Director, Office of Research Integrity
Situated Cognition II – 2/5
Read
- Jean Lave, Cognition in Practice, Chapters 5-8
Methods Discussion: Action Research
- Read: Ned Kock, Action Research: Its Nature and Relationship to Human-Computer Interaction, The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction
Situated Cognition I – 1/29
Read
- Jean Lave, Cognition in Practice, Chapters 1-4
Methods Discussion: Ethnography & Participant Observation
- Read:
- Merrigan & Huston, “Ethnographic Research”
- Lindlof & Taylor, “New Media and Participant Observation”
- Going Further: Lindlof & Taylor, “Participating, Observing, and Recording Social Action”
- Going Further: Lindlof & Taylor, “Qualitative Interviewing”
Traditions in Psychology and Cognitive Science – 1/22
In this week’s class, we will review the history of different traditions in psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, with special attention to mainstream cognitive science and the traditions in psychology and cognitive science that influence the alternative approaches we discuss in the course.
Read
Focus on texts in bold. Familiarize yourself with the other texts, but don’t stress too much about the details.
- Paul Thagard, “Cognitive Science,” Stanford Encyclopedia to Philosophy
- Andy Clark, selections from Mindware
- Going Further: Andy Clark, “Cognitive Technology” (from Mindware)
- John Dewey, “The Reflex-Arc Concept in Psychology”
- Going Further: Mark Johnson, “Cognitive science and Dewey’s theory of mind, thought, and language,” Cambridge Companion to Dewey
- Going Further: Matthias Jung, “John Dewey and action,” Cambridge Companion to Dewey
- Lev Vygotsky, “Consciousness as a problem in the psychology of behavior”
- Going Further: James Wertsch, Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind
- J.J. Gibson, “The Ecological Approach to the Visual Perception of Pictures”
- Going Further: E. Bruce Goldstein, “The Ecology of J. J. Gibson’s Perception”
Methods Discussion: Cognitive Analysis
- Activity: Cognitive Diary (due in class)
Introduction – 1/15
This week we will get an overview of the course topics and assignments, review the syllabus, and discuss the following articles.
Read
- Shaffer & Clinton, “Toolforthoughts: Reexamining Thinking in the Digital Age”
- N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, Prologue
- Jean Lave, “What’s Special about Experiments as Contexts for Thinking”
Assignment
- Read articles BEFORE class.
- Leave a comment below and tell us something about yourself. (You don’t have to use your full name, but enter your UTD email address (it won’t be published) or otherwise enough information for me to figure out who you are.)
Lecture Notes
Cognition, Culture, and Communication
Cross-listed as EMAC/ATEC 6372: “Approaches to Emergent Media and Communication: Cognition, Culture, and Communication” and ACN 6V81: “Special Topics: Cognition, Culture, and Communication.”
Course Updates
For course updates, check out the blog (HTML / RSS) or Twitter (using the hashtag #UTDCCC). Time-sensitive updates will be sent via email to your official university address.
Course Description
Media theorists interested in how media impacts human minds and culture. Communication scholars and cognitive scientists interested in the empirical, qualitative study of the human mind in its social, cultural, communicative, and technological contexts. HCI, UI, and UX and Emerging Media experts, engineers, and designers who want to better study and understand how communicative systems and cultural artifacts interface with human cognition and experience.
This course covers radical theories of and methodological approaches to three core aspects of the study of the human: cognition, culture, and communication. We will look at challenges to common assumptions about these three aspects and work to build an alternative understanding of them relevant to work in emerging media and communications and human-computer interaction.
Cognition, communication, and culture traditionally mark ontological distinctions as well as disciplinary boundaries. Cognition covers the individual operation of the isolated human mind, and is the domain of psychology (and the associated cognitive sciences). Communication is the interaction of human minds through a medium, and is covered by the eponymous field of study as well as media and information theory. Culture includes the shared knowledge, values, and practices of a larger social group and is the traditional field of anthropology. The humanities cover aspects of culture and communication but are not considered relevant to their “scientific” study. The ideal unification of science would relate these three categories reductively: culture can be reduced to acts of communication, acts of communication can be reduced to the cognitive operation of individual minds… and so on down to the level of physical particles.
We will examine a host of radical challenges to this traditional picture of separate, hierarchically organized ontological categories. We will examine critical and constructive approaches that treat cognition as embodied and enacted, constituted by culture and communication, socially and technologically distributed, extended, and mediated, as well as approaches to culture and communication which recognize them as inherently cognitive activities, rather than the epiphenomenal residue of the operation of individual minds. Rather than individualism and reductionism, we should think of cognition, culture, and communication as mutually co-constituting. We should not study them separately, but instead we should examine cognitive-cultural-communicative (C3) processes and systems. We will look at different theories of the nature of C3 processes and systems as well as qualitative empirical methodologies for their study. Students will apply their understanding of C3 systems to emerging media systems in particular.
Theories and Methods
This course uses several theoretical perspectives and methodological frameworks, and many of them alternatives to the orthodox approaches in cognitive science, psychology, communication, anthropology, and sociology. Here are the main ones you will become familiar with in the course:
- Situated Cognition / Situated Action
- Distributed Cognition
- Cultural Psychology / Cultural-historical Psychology
- CHAT / Activity Theory
- Actor-Network-Theory
- Cognitive Ethnography
- Action Research / Participatory Action Research
In general, methodological discussions in this course will focus on various forms of qualitative research method.
Required Texts
Textbooks are available at Off Campus Books
- Jean Lave, Cognition in Practice (1988)
- Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (1995)
- Michael Cole, Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline (1996)
- Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2005)
Addition required readings will be made available via course website.
Further Suggested Readings
- Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
- Taylor & Lindlof, Qualitative Communication Research Methods
- Donald Norman, The Psychology of Everyday Things / The Design of Everday Things
Assignments
- Seminar attendance and participation / discussion questions
- Weekly assignments and activities
- Research proposal – proposal for empirical research on a C3 system, based on theories and methods learned in the course.
- Choose one:
- Theoretical paper – interpretation of C3 system using theoretical concepts from the course (connecting w/ existing empirical studies)
- Video Ethnography project – Use cognitive ethnography and other methods from the course to study a C3 system in the wild.
Course Schedule
Click to see readings and assignments.
- 1/15 – Introduction
- 1/22 – Traditions in Psychology and Cognitive Science
- 1/29 – Situated Cognition I – The Problem of Cognitive Theory in Practice
- 2/5 – Situated Cognition II – Putting Practice in Theory
- 2/12 – Distributed Cognition I – Ship Navigation as a Cognitive Process
- 2/19 – Distributed Cognition II – The Social Organization of Cognition
- 2/26 – Distributed Cognition III – Learning in DCog Systems
- 3/5 – Distributed Cognition IV – Cognition as a Cultural Practice + Cognitive Ethnography
3/10-3/16 – Spring Break! - 3/19 – Cultural Psychology I – A Tale of Two Psychologies
- 3/26 – Cultural Psychology II – Keeping Culture in Mind
- 4/2 – Cultural Psychology III – Researching Cultural-Historical Activity Systems
- 4/9 – Actor-Network-Theory I – Following Controversies
- 4/16 – Actor-Network-Theory II – Tracing Associations, Reassembling Collectives
- 4/23 – Productive Encounters
- 4/30 – Presentations & Wrap-Up
Course Policies and Expectations
David Graeber on Superheroes
David Graeber has been on my radar since the start of Occupy last year. Between his involvement there and a variety of commentaries and discussions on his book Debt, I was primed to be a fan. Then he wrote an essay about superheroes. What he has to say is not very insightful. I’m honestly pretty disappointed.
Dewey on Standpoint Epistemology
Quote
Women have as yet made little contribution to philosophy. But when women who are not mere students of other persons’ philosophy set out to write it, we cannot conceive that it will be the same in viewpoint or tenor as that composed from the standpoint of the different masculine experience of things.
– John Dewey, Philosophy and Democracy (1919)