Data, Culture and Society

Big data and computational methods for its analysis are changing scientific andhumanities research, financial markets, political campaigning, higher education andcountless other areas, and also affect our everyday lives. Our daily existence isincreasingly structured by software systems that process massive amounts of dataand generate results such as music and book recommendations, search enginesoutputs, car routes, airline prices, etc.In this course, we explore the social, political and cultural impact of our society’sreliance on massive (and often real-time) data analysis. We will discuss the concepts behind data collection, organization, analysis, visualization, and publication. We will also discuss possibilities, limitations, and implications of using big data-centric methods in social science and humanities research, and the already developed work in computational social science, digital humanities and cultural analytics fields. Students will become familiar with the history and basic concepts of the fundamental paradigms developed by modern societies to analyze patterns in data—statistics, visualization, data mining, and machine learning.Finally, we also want to ask general questions about society and culture in a data-centric society. The arrival of social media and the gradual move of knowledge andmedia distribution and cultural communication to digital networks in the early 21stcentury has created a new cultural landscape which challenges our existing methods for the study of and assumptions about culture. What new theoretical concepts do we need to deal with the new scale of born-digital culture? What data analysis and visualization techniques developed by industry and sciences are most useful for cultural analysis? How can we use big cultural data to question what we know about culture and generate new questions?

Offer as needed

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