CritMakingAgeOfAI
Resources to accompany the book *Critical Making in the Age of AI* by Emily Johnson and Anastasia Salter
Resources for Critical Making in the Age of AI
Emily Johnson and Anastasia Salter
About the Book
Critical Making in the Age of AI (available now open access and in print from Amherst College Press!) invites readers to explore the practice of making as scholarship, grounded in the humanities, that interweaves design, function, and theory towards born-digital scholarly practice. Engaging in scholarly communication through digital platforms demands attention to code, software, and hardware: all practices traditionally connected to communities of technology that can be exclusionary and difficult to engage. By resisting traditional entry points into these modes of digital making and instead turning to craft for inspiration, Critical Making in the Age of AI emphasizes building a theoretical framework and applied practice in critical making, drawing on digital humanities discourse, intentional design, minimal scripting tools, and multimodal development as part of scholarly communication. This places the emphasis not on learning tools for their own sake, but on thinking through the relationship of our tools (and our code) with our disciplines and scholarship. This practice is even more critical in the humanities classroom as tools for rapid creation, powered by generative artificial intelligence, are being rapidly normalized: this book encourages slow making while providing strategies for confronting and learning from this changing software landscape. The patterns (drawing on techniques from crafts) offered in each section are intended to provide launching points for creating playful, creative digital scholarly objects ranging from 2D games and Twitter bots to interactive visualizations and hypertext essays. We emphasize free tools, with attention to sustainable and scalable solutions that can be brought to research, online teaching, or the traditional classroom without external funding or institutional support.
How to Use these Materials
This GitHub repository demonstrates our approach to integrating and building upon these materials in our own courses: the sample syllabi have been shortened to remove specific dates and course policies, and can be forked directly for your own use. All the patterns included in the book are duplicated here with the modifications we’ve used for addressing different levels of students, and are intended to be further modified to fit your own classroom.
In addition, working samples of student works have been provided for each pattern to demonstrate different potential outcomes and show the process in action. Student samples are attributed, and reproduced here with permission from the students.
Sample Courses
Example Work
Selfie
- Mónica G. González Burgos, Selfie
- Alessandra Zinicola Lopez, Selfie
- Anastasia Salter, Selfie
- Ashley Zirkle, Selfie and Plan
Comic
GIF
Map
- Emilie Buckley, Map and Data File
- Taylor Rice, Map and Data File
- Sarah Scalisi, Map and Data File
- Mirek Stolee, Map and Data File