76-714 Data Stories
9–12 units, Carnegie Mellon University
Every dataset has a story. In the age of big data, it is vital to understand the unlikely casts of algorithms, data miners, researchers, data janitors, pirates, data brokers, financiers, etc. whose activities shape culture. This course will feature a range of farm to table data stories, some going back hundreds of years, and introduce students to resources and strategies for contextual research. It will explore cases such as the London cholera epidemic, Google Books, Netflix, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Strava map, and the Queen Nefertiti scan alongside several pieces of art and fiction that capture aspects of data stories typically obscured elsewhere. Research methods introduced will include book history, media archeology, history of information, infrastructure studies, ethnography, narratology, and digital forensics. Students will read scholarly articles, novels, journalism, and popular nonfiction they will test algorithms and they will develop individualized longform research and writing projects informed by computational methods in data studies, journalism, and art.
Prerequisites: none listed
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