Schedule

Unit I: What is truth? What is a fact? What is data?

Thursday, January 10^th – What is a fact?

• In class: “The Fact of the Matter” (Radiolab episode); Errol Morris, from The Thin Blue Line (1998)

Tuesday, January 15^th – Fact-checking

• Read: John D’Agata, “What Happens There” (PDF)
• Read: John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, The Lifespan of a Fact, Chapters 1-3
• In class: Fact-checking exercise; Jennifer McDonald, “In the Details”; from The Smoking Gun, “A Million Little Lies.”
  

Thursday, January 17^th – Lifespan of a Fact discussion

• Read: Lifespan of a Fact, Chapters 7-9
• Read: John McPhee, “Checkpoints” (PDF)
• In class: Skype with Jim Fingal; Laura Miller, “In Defense of Fact Checking.”
• Due: Blog Cycle 1.1

Tuesday, January 22^nd  – The historical fact

• Read: Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, “Seeing and Believing: The Experimental Production of Pneumatic Facts,” from Leviathan and the Air-Pump (PDF)
• In class: Mark Hansen, “Movable Type”

Thursday, January 24^th – The trouble with facts

• Read: MT Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Part I (pp. 1-116)
• In class: Octavian Nothing discussion; Shapin and Schaffer, “The Trouble with Experiment,” from Leviathan and the Air-Pump (PDF); Mark Marino, “Living Will.”
• Due: Blog Cycle 1.2

Tuesday, January 29^th – The modern fact

• Read: Octavian Nothing, Part II (pp. 117-236)
• In class: Octavian Nothing discussion; Bruno Latour, “Constitution,” from We Have Never Been Modern (PDF)
• NO CLASS MEETING - Professor out of town

Thursday, January 31^st – Computational Journalism symposium

• NO CLASS MEETING – Attend at least one session of the Computational Journalism Symposium (for schedule, click link).
• Due: First formal assignment: Dataset analysis

Tuesday, February 5^th  – The modern fact

• Read: Octavian Nothing, Parts III and IV (pp. 237-353)
• In class: Octavian Nothing discussion; computational journalism discussion; the modern fact discussion (moved from 1/29)

Thursday, February 7^th – The postmodern fact

• Watch before class: Larry and Andy Wachowski, The Matrix (1999)
• In class: Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simluacra,” from Simluations (PDF)
• Due: Blog Cycle 1.3

Unit II: Visualizing Data

Tuesday, February 12^th  – Visualization

• Read: Daniel Rosenberg, “Data before the Fact” (PDF)
• Read: Jason Oberholtzer and Cody Westphal, “Introduction,” “Internet,” “Life,” “Nerds,” and “Music,” from I Love Charts (PDF)
• In class: Lev Manovich, “What is Visualization?”; “A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods”

Thursday, February 14^th – Visualization in film (Part I)

• In-class screening: Minority Report (Part I)
• Due: Blog Cycle 1.4

Tuesday, February 19^th– Visualization Workshop

• Read: Edward Tufte, “Graphical Excellence” and “Graphical Integrity,” from The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (PDF)
• In class: Visualization workshop

Thursday, February 21^st  – Taxonomies and Charts

• Read: Alex Wright, “Networks and Hierarchies” and “The Moose that Roared,” from Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages (PDF)
• In class:  Thomas Jefferson, from Notes on the State of Virginia; William Playfair, from The Commercial and Political Atlas (PDF) and The Statistical Breviary (PDF); Theodore Porter, from The  Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (PDF)
• Ben Schmidt on shipping logs and Melville
• Due: Blog Cycle 2.1

Tuesday, February 26^th  – Timelines 

• Read: Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, “Time in Print,” “A New Chart of History,” and “Frontier Lines,” from Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (PDF)
• In class: Chronozoom; Lev Manovich, “Data Stream, Database, Timeline“

Thursday, February 28^th – Visualization in film (Part II) 

• In-class screening: Minority Report (Part II)

Tuesday, March 5^th  – Expanded Applications

• Read: Edward Tufte, “Visual Confections: Juxtapositions from the Ocean of the Streams of Story,” from Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (PDF)
• In class: more Tufte; Minority Report discussion; The Secret Lives of Numbers”; Jonathan Harris, “We Feel Fine” and “The Whale Hunt.”

Thursday, March 7^th

• Due (in class): Midterm Project Presentations
• Due: Midterm Project and Reflection

Tuesday, March 12^th  – Cities of data; cities of the mind

• Read: Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, pp. 1-76
• In class: the Muppets travel by map; Mark Monmonier, from How to Lie with Maps (PDF);  Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display” (PDF); Charles Cuming, The 21 Steps; Stephen Wiltshire’s cityscapes; MVRDV’s datascapes; Curious Incident discussion.
• If time: Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (PDF); Eli Horowitz, The Silent History (iPad ap).

Thursday, March 14^th – Geospatial viz, cont’d. (subtitle: problems with viz)

• Read: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, pp. 76-158
• In class: Curious Incident discussion; Malcolm Gladwell, “The Picture Problem”; In class: Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “Epistemologies of the Eye” and “Mechanical Objectivity” from Objectivity (PDF)
• Due: Blog Cycle 2.2

Tuesday, March 19^th  and Thursday, March 21^st

• NO CLASS MEETING – Spring Break

Tuesday, March 26^th – Personal viz

• Read: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, pp. 158-end
• Read: Jennifer Egan, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” from A Visit to the Goon Squad 
• In class: Curious Incident and Egan discussion; Cory Archangel, “Data Diaries”; Jason Nelson, various projects; Feltron Annual Reports; Stephen Wolfram, “The Personal Analytics of My Life”

Thursday, March 28^th –  Networks and viz; Gephi workshop

• Read: Alexander Galloway, “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?,” from The Interface Effect (PDF)
• In class: Gephi workshop <- BRING LAPTOPS TO CLASS
• Due: Blog Cycle 2.3

UNIT III: THE FUTURE OF/AND DATA

Tuesday, April 2^nd – Data and surveillance

• Read: Charles Duhigg, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets.”
• Read: Rita Raley, “Dataveillance and Countervailance,” from Raw Data is an Oxymoron (PDF)
• Read: Lisa Parks, “Satellite and Cyber Visualities: Analyzing ‘Digital Earth,’” from The Visual Culture Reader (PDF)
• In class: A Superstitious Fund.

Thursday, April 4^th – Silicon Jungle; Tableau workshop

• Read: Shumeet Baluja, The Silicon Jungle, pp. 1-100
• In class: Silicon Jungle discussion; dataveillance/counterveillance discussion, cont’d. 
• Due: Blog Cycle 2.4

Tuesday, April 9^th – Gattaca viewing (class will run late)

• Read: The Silicon Jungle, pp. 101-199
• In class: Andrew Niccol, Gattaca (1997)

Thursday, April 11^th – Gattaca & Silicon Jungle discussion

• Read: The Silicon Jungle, pp. 200-end
• In class: Gattaca and Silicon Jungle discussion
• Due: Bonus Blog Cycle 

Tuesday, April 16^th  – Data and art

• In class: John Whitney, Matrix III; Vik Cosek, ASCII movies; John F. Simon, Jr.; Takashi Murada, data moshing videos; JODI; Lev Manovich, “The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art”; more TBD.

Thursday, April 18^th  – Data and publics

• In class: Microsoft Research, “The AIDS Memorial Quilt,” more TBD.

Tuesday April 23^rd, Wednesday April 24th, and Thursday, April 25^th 

• NO CLASS MEETING – Conferences

April 30^th, 11:30am – Final Project/Analysis Due