Sociology

This course covers the conceptual frameworks and applied methodologies for user centered design and user experience research. Emphasis is placed on learning and practicing a variety of usability research methods/techniques such as scenario development, user profiling, tasks analysis, contextual inquiry, card sorting, usability tests, log data analysis, expert inspection and heuristic evaluation. This is a research and evaluation course on usability and user experience with the assumption that the results of user and usability research would feed directly into various stages of the interface design cycle. Assignments include learning to use Morae software suite to run tests, conducting literature review of usability research, performing a method and tool review of usability research approaches and a variety of emerging usability research software, and completing the term project in usability testing. The usability test project uses actual real time cases from organizations in the local area.

This course explores the social implications of the digital revolution, including ethical issues associated with algorithmic design and privacy at the intersection of political communication, data science, ethics, and policy. It mainly discusses the use of data and datafication in society from social and psychology lens. The first part of the course covers the creation of “big data” that is recorded and circulated in the form of data beyond particular moment and place. Next, it covers selected topics in which such data is being used to understand or influence people’s behavior in (political and other subfield of) communication. Finally, the latter part of the course covers various ethical and societal implications of big data and its applications in society.

This interdisciplinary course examines the representation of London in a variety of cultural outputs from the Victorian to the contemporary period. In particular, it analyzes how writers and artists have expressed their perception of the city as a dark site of social tensions, mystery, crime, and detective work. Alongside representative literary texts (from Dickens and Conan Doyle to Ackroyd), the course makes room for a significant amount of visual material such as illustrations (Doré, Cruikshank), films (Hitchcock, Reed), television dramas (Ripper Street, Sherlock), and documentaries (Keiller, Ackroyd). It is also supplemented by visits to UCL Collections and other London Museums.

The course discusses the problems, methods, and results of sociolinguistics, in particular the social aspects that influence linguistic change. It explores the incidence of social and cultural factors in the acquisition and use of language, as well as on the sociolinguistic status of Indigenous languages and the linguistic planning of the different Latin American countries.