Data Driven Societies Digital & Computational Studies Bowdoin College January 22, 2014 Professors Gieseking & Gaze Lecture Slides "Social Data Sciences; or, Is everything “data” and is “everything” data?"

1. Data Driven Societies:
What is Data???
Professors Gaze & Gieseking

2. Data Today
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Digitization
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Cheap storage
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Easy retrieval
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Global reach
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So...is everything data?
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And is data everything?
http://pstrassmann.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-much-data-is-processed-in-servers.html

3. Example: The Cost of Data

4. The Cost of Data is Unequal

5. Debating Data
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“Data analytics can giev us stable financial systems,
functional governments, efficient and affordable health
care, and more.” - Alex Pentland
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“Data is an abstraction of real life, and real life can be
complicated, but if you gather enough context, you
can at least put forth a solidarity effort to make sense
of it.” - Nathan Yau (not his best writing)

6. More about Wordpress
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Free & open source (versus proprietary)
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Build your own website/world
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Theme options
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Plugin functionality
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User collaboration
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Interactive and creative space

7. Course Website

8. Social Scientific Approach
0. Identify an issue
1. Research question
2. Theoretical approach
3. Literature review
4. Methods
5. Analysis
6. Discussion
7. Conclusion

9. Should our site be public?
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Pros: share with public, create portfolio of work,
represent Bowdoin
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Cons: learning process
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We vote today!

10. Data scraping & Python
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Data scraping is the process of gathering data from
another output via computer programming
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Programming languages require speaking to a
computer in a way it understands
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Python is one of the most ubiquitous and useful
programming languages today
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Free and open source software (F/OSS)