The first hour of the CS698 / ENGL795 meetings will be held with the Gamification for Mental Health Working Group. Persuasive health technologies will be a key theme of the course but participants are welcome to choose widely for their course project. This first hour will focus on various topics in persuasive health technologies, including health rhetoric, narrative-for-health, and gamification.
Readings will be available online, DC Library reserve, or from the course coordinator.The course will survey current theories of Rhetoric and Argumentation that are being applied to analyze and generate persuasive language in various forms of online communication. The course will also investigate how such theories are presently being used in computational algorithms for artificial intelligence systems.
Selected topics will include:
Rhetoric and Argumentation are intrinsic to human intelligence and reasoning, not only in formal situations like understanding chains of reasoning in scientific articles or legal texts, but in everyday life, where we constantly express our own, and evaluate others', sentiments and opinions, interpret media, judge politicians, and so forth, in order to understand situations and make appropriate decisions.
Studies of Computational Rhetoric and Argumentation—and how these subjects may be applied in persuasive language technologies—are bringing together researchers and practitioners from many disciplines, including Philosophy, Logic, Linguistics, Argumentation Theory, Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning.
In this course we aim to develop a multidisciplinary approach through the interaction of participants from both the Humanities and the Computational Sciences. While the end goal for all course projects will be an artifact illustrating some aspect of a persuasive language technology, the artifact itself may be as varied as a model, a design, a prototype, or an actual implementation.Topics will include: rhetorical theory; formal models of argumentation; informal logic; computational argumentation; models of health communication; computational models of narrative; persuasion in social media; digital rhetoric; rhetoric of technology; persuasive games.
Participants will be expected to read widely and in-depth. There are no formal requirements other than interest in the topics and ability to read and analyze technical material, to present oral summaries, and to take part in group discussions.
Note: It is understood that course participants will be given the opportunity to focus their writings, presentations, and project on material suited to their academic background.
These are one-page "thinkpieces" based on the weekly readings and intended to promote discussion. Each precis should address responses to one or more of the discussion questions posted for the week in question.
Each participant will be responsible for posting 3 sets of discussion questions, and co-leading (in a team of two) the subsequent discussion in the following session.
A one-page research proposal outlining the research question, the methodology, and how the proposed artifact will address the research question.
Monday January 9, 12:00-2:30, DC1316
Jay Heinrichs, Thank you for arguing: What Aristotle,
Lincoln, and Homer Simpson can teach us about the
art of persuasion,
Three Rivers Press, revised edition, 2013
All participants in the course
will receive a copy of Thank you for arguing
Monday January 16, 12:00-2:30, DC1316
Monday January 23, 12:00-2:30, DC1316
Judy Z. Segal, Health and the rhetoric of medicine, Southern Illinois University Press, 2008
Introduction: The What, Why, and How of a Rhetoric of Medicine
Chapter 1: A Kairology of Biomedicine
Chapter 5: A Rhetoric of Death and Dying
(for interest only) Chapter 7: The Problem of Patience
"Non-Compliance": Paternalism, Expertise, and the
Ethos of the Physician
Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical style: The uses of language in persuasion, Oxford University Press, 2011
Chapter 6: Figures of Word Choice
Chapter 13: Speaker and Audience Construction
Chapter 14: Incorporating Other Voices
Monday January 30, 12:00-2:30, DC1316
Monday February 6, 12:00-2:30, DC1316
Jerome Groopman,
How doctors think,
Mariner Books, 2008
Chapter: Flesh-and-Blood Decision-Making
Chapter: Marketing, Money, and Medical Decisions
Christopher W. Tindale,
Acts of arguing: A rhetorical model of argument,
State University of New York Press, 1999
Introduction: The Case for Rhetorical Argumentation
Chapter 5: Case Studies in Rhetorical Argumentation (5.1)
Stephen E. Toulmin,
The uses of argument,
Cambridge University Press, second edition, 2003
Chapter III The Layout of Arguments
Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical figures in science,
Oxford University Press, 1999
Chapter 2 Antithesis
Chapter 5 Ploche and Polyptoton
Douglas Walton and Christopher Reed,
Argumentation schemes,
Cambridge University Press, 2008
Chapter 1: Basic Tools in the State of the Art
Chapter 8: The History of Schemes (review only)
Chapter 9: A User's Compendium of Schemes (reference only)
Chapter 12: Schemes in Computer Systems
Monday February 13, 12:00-2:30, DC1316
Monday February 27, 12:00-2:30, DC1316
In August 2016, the Department of English and Literature and the Cheriton School of Computer Science presented the second Workshop on the intersection of computers and rhetorical figures.
The Workshop brought together scholars from a variety of fields in the Humanities and Computational Sciences. A major outcome of the Workshop will be a Special Issue of the journal Argument and Computation on Rhetorical Figures in Computational Argument Studies.
Sophisticated, complex, and numerous, rhetorical figures from antimetabole to zeugma have been rich resources for communication, literature and argumentation for over two millenia.
Digital technologies can both chart the subtleties of rhetorical figures and, in turn, deploy them to chart out the textual universe. Genre detection, sentiment detection, authorship attribution, argument analysis—wherever there are words, there are figures. Wherever there are figures, there are patterns. Wherever there are patterns, there are purposes to detect, diagnose, and critique.
Ruan, Sebastian; DiMarco, Chrysanne; and Harris, Randy, "Rhetorical figure annotation with XML", Computational Models of Natural Argumentation (CMNA)16, A Workshop at the 2016 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), New York, July 2016.
Chris Reed and Timothy J. Norman (eds.), Argumentation machines, Springer, 2004
A landmark Workshop in 2004 brought together researchers in Argumentation Theory and Artificial Intelligence to explore interdisciplinary collaborations in Computational Rhetoric and Argumentation—the Workshop laid the foundation for the field of Computational Argumentation
Nancy L. Green,
"Argumentation for scientific claims in a biomedical research article",
Workshop on Frontiers and Connections between Argumentation Theory
and Natural Language Processing (ArgNLP 2014),
Forli-Cesena, Italy, July 21-25, 2014
Srijan Kumar, Robert West, and Jure Leskovec,
"Disinformation on the Web: Impact, characteristics, and
detection of Wikipedia hoaxes",
WWW 2016, April 11–15, 2016, Montréal
Discussion leader (primary): Salman
Iyad Rahwan and Kate Larson, "Logical mechanism design",
The Knowledge Engineering Review, Vol. 26:1, 61-69, 2011
Discussion leader (primary): Ahmad
S. Parsons, K. Atkinson, Z. Li, P. McBurney, E. Sklar, M. Singh, K. Haigh, K. Levitt, J. Rowe, "Argument schemes for reasoning about trust", Argument & Computation, 2014, 5(2-3), 160-190
Monday March 6, 12:00-2:30, DC1316
Monday March 13, 12:00-2:30, DC1316
Floris Bex and Trevor Bench-Capon, "Understanding narratives with argumentation", Computational models of argument, S.Parsons et al. (eds.), IOS Press, 2014
Appraisal Framework: Appraisal and Journalistic Discourse
Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Healing the mind through the power of story: The promise of narrative psychiatry, Bear & Company, 2010.
Introduction (read)
Chapter 2: Good Stories and Mental Health (skim)
(skim only) Raymond A. Mar,
"The neuropsychology of narrative: Story comprehension,
story production and their interrelation",
Neuropsychologia, 42, 1414-1434, 2004
"Stories are used extensively for human communication; both the comprehension and production of oral and written narratives constitute a fundamental part of our experience. ...Story comprehension appears to entail a network of frontal, temporal and cingulate areas that support working-memory and theory-of-mind processes. ...Storytelling is thus not only a native element of our social interactions, from a health standpoint there is evidence to suggest it may also be a necessary one."
Michael White, Maps of narrative practice, W.W. Norton & Company, 2007
Lewis Mehl-Madrona and Barbara Mainguy, Remapping your mind: The neuroscience of self-transformation through story, Bear & Company, 2015
"Applying the latest neuroscience research on memory, brain mapping, and brain plasticity to the field of narrative therapy, Lewis Mehl-Madrona and Barbara Mainguy explain how the brain is specialized in the art of story-making and story-telling. They detail mind-mapping and narrative therapy techniques that use story to change behavior patterns in ourselves, our relationships, and our communities. They explore studies that reveal how memory works through story, how the brain recalls things in narrative rather than lists, and how our stories modify our physiology and facilitate health or disease."
Copies of both texts are available from course coordinator Monday March 20, 12:00-2:30, DC1316
Monday March 27, 12:00-2:30, DC1316
SELECTIONS TBA: Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson, Rhetoric and the digital humanities, University of Chicago Press, 2015
SELECTIONS TBA: Douglas Eyman, Digital rhetoric: Theory, method, practice, Digital Humanities Series, U of M Digital Culture Books, 2015
Monday April 3, 12:00-2:30, DC1316
SELECTIONS TBA: Readings from Stanford University course PWR 1SB: "Machine Dreams, The rhetoric of technology":
Readings from Ian Bogost, Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames, The MIT Press, 2010
Douglas Guilbeault, "Growing bot security: An ecological view of bot agency", International Journal of Communication 10, 5003-5012, 2016
D. Guilbeault and S. Woolley,
"How Twitter bots are shaping the election",
The Atlantic, Nov 2, 2016
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/election-bots/506072/
"Between the first two presidential debates, a third of pro-Trump tweets and nearly a fifth of pro-Clinton tweets came from automated accounts"
Nicholas Carr, "Is Google making us stupid?, The Atlantic, 2008 available at: http://nicholascarr.com/
Nicholas Carr,
The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains,
W.W. Norton & Co., 2011
Artur S. d'Avila Garcez, Dov M. Gabbay, Luis C. Lamb, "A neural cognitive model of argumentation with application to legal inference and decision making", Journal of Applied Logic, 2014, 12(2), pp109-127
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