Data Driven Societies
Digital & Computational Studies
Bowdoin College
February 17, 2014
Professors Gieseking & Gaze
Lecture Slides "On Digital Publics of Opening…or Not"
2. Announcements!
✦
Hackathons: 2/26 or 4/23
from 6-9pm, VAC 3rd fl.
(must attend at least one)
!
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Field trip 2/28 at
11am-1.30pm, need IDs
!
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Time to check on the
data: download this
week’s ScraperWiki
senaiben.org
3. Data & Information (Recap)
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Information society
!
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Data vs. information
!
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Information-as-freedom
vs. information-as-control
4. Big Data & Privacy (recap)
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Ethical research
!
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Data sample and data
access
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Firehose, gardenhose,
spritzer
✦
API
!
✦
Defining big data,
defining privacy
daily.captaindash.com
5. Searching the Engine / for
Privacy (recap)
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Filter bubble, machine learning, privacy
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Team exercise on blog posts
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Begin lab
✦
Quiz
6. What Does It Mean to Go
Public?
mappingbooks.blogspot.com
8. Representing Representation
✦
2-3 minutes: present you peer’s research based on her or his
representation post
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1 minute rebuttal: add anything else you want to
!
When you are all complete, discuss:
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What surprised (or not) you about what you heard?
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What trends do you see developing across your hashtag
theme? What is specific to you?
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What trends do you think could be explored further in your
peers’ hashtag analysis in the future? And in your own future
analysis?
11. Social Scientific Approach
0. Identify an issue
1. Research question
2. Theoretical approach
3. Literature review
4. Methods
5. Analysis
6. Discussion
7. Conclusion
12. Digital Natives, a.k.a. Digitized
American Youth
✦
77% have a cell phone
✦
95% have internet
access
✦
80% with internet
access use social media
✦
Average of 3,417 texts
per month
from the
Pew Internet & American Life Project 2011-2012
digitalfamiysummit.com
14. Opening Proprietary
Ecologies
✦
77% have a cell phone
✦
95% have internet
access
✦
80% with internet
access use social media
✦
Average of 3,417 texts
per month
from the
Pew Internet & American Life Project 2011-2012
15. ScraperWiki Support
A clever and elegant solution to our problem of
accessing Twitter data with a limited number of calls:
!
1. Open ScraperWiki and view your table
!
2. Download EVERY MONDAY
!
3. Restart EVERY MONDAY (you will need to do this
the first Monday of break too)
16. Interpretation is Inevitable &
Essential
All researchers are interpreters of data. …
Interpretation is the center of data analysis.
-boyd & Crawford (2012)
!
Interpretation - the act of explaining meaning, i.e.,
transforming data into information and information into
knowledge
17. Interpretation is…
!
!
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Design decisions grow from what is measured
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Limitation and bias lead to misinterpretation
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Can we transcend subjectivity? Can we ever be truly
objective?