Calendar

History of Data

Tuesday, January 13 (Week 1)

• Introduction to the class and its themes
• Machine Imagined Artworks, based on data from The Tate
• The Anatomy of a Tweet

Thursday, January 15

• Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”
• Stephen Fortune, “A Brief History of Databases” (2014)
• John Durham Peters, “Information: Notes Toward a Critical History,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 12 (1988): 9-23. (e-journal)

Tuesday, January 20 (Week 2)

• Alex Wright, “Networks and Hierarchies” from Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages (2007) (e-book and Moodle)
• Daniel Rosenberg, “Data before the Fact” from “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron, ed. Lisa Gitelman (2013)
• Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph”

Thursday, January 22

• Mark Poster, “Databases as Discourse” from The Second Media Age (1995)
• Lev Manovich, “The Database” from The Language of New Media (2001)

Data and Power

Tuesday, January 27 (Week 3)

• Blogging: Group 1 (Readers); Group 2 (N/A); Group 3 (Responders); Group 4 (N/A); Group 5 (Observers)
• David Lyon, “From Big Brother to the Electronic Panopticon” from The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (1994)

Thursday, January 29

• Jonathan Finn, Introduction and “Visible Criminality: Data Collection, Border Security, and Public Display” from Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society (2009)

Tuesday, February 3 (Week 4)

• Blogging: Group 2 (Readers); Group 3 (N/A); Group 4 (Responders); Group 5 (N/A); Group 1 (Observers)
• Lauren Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature 85, no. 4 (January 1, 2013): 661–88.
• Micki Kaufman, “‘Everything on Paper Will be Used Against Me’: Quantifying Kissinger” (2014) [Directions: Watch the video, then drill down to view different methods or visualizations]
• The Papers of Thomas Jefferson

Thursday, February 5

• Rita Raley, “Dataveillance and Countervailance” from “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, ed. Lisa Gitelman (2013)

Tuesday, February 10 (Week 5)

• Blogging: Group 3 (Readers); Group 4 (N/A); Group 5 (Responders); Group 1 (NA); Group 2 (Observers)
• “NSA Files Decoded: What the Revelations Mean for You” in The Guardian

Thursday, February 12

• Discuss Data Critique datasets in class
• * Data Critique Due on Monday 2/16 *

Big Data and Visualization

Tuesday, February 17 (Week 6)

• Blogging: Group 4 (Readers); Group 5 (N/A); Group 1 (Responders); Group 2 (NA); Group 3 (Observers)
• Lev Manovich, “Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data” from Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012)
• Alice Marwick, “How Your Data Are Being Deeply Mined” from The New York Review of Books (2014)

Thursday, February 19

• danah boyd and Kate Crawford, Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon, Information, Communication, and Society 15:5, 2012, 662-679
• Steven Salzberg, “Why Google Flu is a Failure: The Hubris of Big Data” (2014)

Tuesday, February 24 (Week 7)

• Blogging: Group 5 (Readers); Group 1 (N/A); Group 2 (Responders); Group 3 (NA); Group 4 (Observers)
• Lev Manovich, “What is Visualization?” from Visual Studies 1 (2011)
• Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, selections from Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (2010)
• Mark Monmonier, selections from How to Lie with Maps (1996)

Thursday, February 26

• Lev Manovich, “Data Stream, Database, Timeline” (2012)
• Edward Tufte, selections from Envisioning Information (1990)
• “We Have Met the Enemy and He is Powerpoint” from The New York Times (2010)
• In class: Charles Joseph Minard and Example of a Bad Chart
• In Class: Network Survey

March 3 & 5 (Week 8)

• Spring Break

Small Data

Tuesday, March 10 (Week 9)

• Blogging: Group 1 (Readers); Group 2 (N/A); Group 3 (Responders); Group 4 (N/A); Group 5 (Observers)

Thursday, March 12

• Ulises Ali Mejias, “Computers as Socializing Tools” from Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World (2013)
• David Easley and Jon Kleinberg, “Graphs” from Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World (2010)
• Whitney Erin Boesel, “Data Occupations” from New Inquiry (2013)

Tuesday, March 17 (Week 10)

• Blogging: Group 2 (Readers); Group 3 (N/A); Group 4 (Responders); Group 5 (N/A); Group 1 (Observers)
• Anne Helen Petersen, “Big Mother Is Watching You: The Track-Everything Revolution Is Here Whether You Want It Or Not” from BuzzFeed (2014)
• Isabel Pedersen, “Augmented Memory, Digital Life, and Computers that Promise to Remember Everything” from Ready to Wear: A Rhetoric of Wearable Computers and Reality-Shifting Media (2013)
• Feltron Annual Reports
• Stephen Wolfram, “The Personal Analytics of My Life”

Thursday, March 12

• Gephi and GraphViz workshops

Data, Art, and Memory

Tuesday, March 26 (Week 11)

• Blogging: Group 3 (Readers); Group 4 (N/A); Group 5 (Responders); Group 1 (N/A); Group 2 (Observers)
• John Foreman, “Data Privacy, Machine Learning, and the Destruction of Mysterious Humanity” (2014)
• Sharon Daniel, “The Database: An Aesthetic of Dignity” from Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (2007)
• In class: Sumedicina data fiction, Everything is Going to be OK, The Aleph: Infinite Wonder by David Hirmes, No Time Machine

Thursday, March 28

• The strange world of computer-generated novels on The Verge
• Robots Become Writers on WGBH
• I Waded In Clear Water by Allison Parrish
• NaNoGenMo 2014: A procedurally generated mysterious codex by Liza Daly
• Common Datasets for computer-generated writing: Propp’s Morphology of the Russian Folktale, Project Gutenberg, ConceptNet, Freebase, dariusk/corpora,

Tuesday, March 31 (Week 12)

• Blogging: Group 4 (Readers); Group 5 (N/A); Group 1 (Responders); Group 2 (N/A); Group 3 (Observers)
• Jonathan Harris, “The Whale Hunt”
• Joyce Walker, “Narratives in the Database: Memorializing September 11th Online.” Computers and Composition 2 (2007): 121–153.

Thursday, April 2

• * Quantified Self Assignment Due *

Tuesday, April 7 (Week 13)

• No Class on April 7 (Easter Break)

Data and Fiction

Thursday, April 9

• Dave Eggers, The Circle (2013), pages 1-101

Tuesday, April 14 (Week 14)

• Blogging: Group 5 (Readers); Group 1 (N/A); Group 2 (Responders); Group 3 (N/A); Group 4 (Observers)
• The Circle, pages 102-205

Thursday, April 16

• The Circle, pages 206-306
• Proposal for “data-based” final project due (250 words in which you identify the set of data you wish to work with and imagine what sort of arguments or claims you might wish to make about the data)
• The Circle collaborative essays (A-K) (L-Z)

Tuesday, April 21 (Week 15)

• The Circle, pages 307-402

Thursday, April 22

• The Circle, pages 403-497

Tuesday, April 28 (Week 16)

• End of Semester Wrap-Up

Thursday, April 30

• Optional Day

Final Exam Period

• * Data-Based Project due by May 13 *