In Winter 2019 academic term, I created and delivered a new interdisciplinary course at FIMS, Western. The course is further described on my Teaching Website. In short, we took a thorough look at the notions of truth, deception, misinformation, disinformation and various types of information manipulation, and how these topics are treated in different disciplines, studied methods of information verification and how they are applied across societal contexts. I felt that the students that agreed to participate in this course would benefit greatly from multiple disciplinary perspectives. We read widely in philosophy, psychology, interpersonal communications and media studies, as well as linguistics, computer science and human computer interaction, criminology, law librarianship and journalism.

I put together a series of guest speakers from diverse backgrounds, including a journalist and a political economist, a law librarian and a detective, and contributions from ongoing or past relevant works of several doctoral students at FIMS (Chen, Wong and Cornwell).

This “News Bits ‘n Bites” blog documents the individual speakers’ contributions to this series, with my sincere gratitude to each and every one of the speakers!

I also invite further feedback from the course participants on the topic selection and inter-relatedness. Anyone else who cares to comment is invited to comment on what ought to be included in such an interdisciplinary graduate course.