Co-Teaching Fellows

Meet our 2023-2024 Co-Teaching Fellows

Annette Vee English
 
Annette Vee is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Composition Program at Pitt, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing, digital composition, materiality, and literacy. She is the author of Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing Writing (MIT Press, 2017), and has published on computer programming, blockchain technologies, intellectual property, and AI-based text generators. Her Humanities Center-sponsored teaching collaboration with Matt Burton draws on her research for her current book project, Automating Writing from Automata to AI, which examines why and how humans have sought to automate writing across history.
 
Matthew Burton Computing and Information
 

Matt Burton is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Culture and Data Stewardship at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Computing and Information. His research focuses on the digital humanities, scholarly communication, and computing education. He teaches design, data science, and computer programming in the Master's of Library and Information Science program at Pitt. He has a PhD from the School of Information at the University of Michigan.

"Writing Robots"
The proposed course "Writing Robots" aims to explore the theoretical and technical approaches to natural language generation (NLG) in writing. It will provide an interdisciplinary experience for students, combining the strengths of the English department and the School of Computing and Information (SCI) at the University of Pittsburgh. The course will cover the technical evolution of NLG technologies, as well as their social, historical, and political contexts. It will also examine the potential for creative and innovative uses alongside uses that harm populations and the environment. The course will use Python programming to generate text and encourage students to engage with the political and ethical implications of NLG technologies. The course will be taught by a team with diverse backgrounds and aims to contribute to the existing DNID major at the University of Pittsburgh.

Past Teaching Fellows: