bowdoin: data driven societies: visualizing social life (when they let you)
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Data Driven Societies Digital & Computational Studies Bowdoin College April 14, 2014 Professor Gieseking Lecture Slides "Visualizing Social Life (When They Let You)"TRANSCRIPT
Data Driven Societies: Visualizing Social Life (When They Let You)Professors Gieseking & Gaze
Recap: Cyborg Embodiment
• Cyborg - closing gap between human and machine
• Big data vs. small data of health care (Neff)
• Ex. Quantified Self • Social network analysis (SNA):
marketing, organizational effectiveness, disease outbreaks, uncover fraud, disrupt terrorist networks (Krebs)
SNA with Gephi
Hacking.
Doubting Hackers
The other side of hacking.
✦ Biella Coleman: anthropologist in STS, ethnographer of Anonymous
✦ Determines respect is earned with Anonymous::
informal, spontaneous, playful, and even lewd speech engaging in activist interventions, some of which are risky and illegal
Getting to Know You: Anonymous
✦ Does earning respect of a marginalized group make us a member of the group?
✦ Questions the borderlands between researched and researched once you become part of the field
✦ Ethnographer speaks to private lives of individuals to the public masses
Am I Anonymous?
✦ “Code as speech”
ethical, legal, cultural ramifications of restructuring
✦ F/OSS developers explore, contest, specify meaning of liberal freedom via free speech and development of new tools, legal and technical
✦ How these developments bolster legal expertise
Coding Freedom
http://codingfreedom.com/
Yet another side of hacking.
Yet another side of hacking.
OLPC
These Kids Today
✦ 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
digitaltrends.com
“Cookie Monsters”
✦ Katz & Donovan confront anxiety around children’s and youth’s use of computers: ✦ 1980s: Children can
overcome being programmed by a computer by learning to code
✦ 2000s: No Child Left Behind routinized exams over experiential learning with tech
Hacking Cookie Monsters
✦ Hacking - play, curious exploration, or as a puzzle solution that helps young people to better understand and control their environments (technological and otherwise)
—> hacking emerges as a site of invention and discovery as well as resistance to various technological fetters (p. 198) troyhunt.com
Ethics of Teaching Our Little Monsters to Hack
✦ Children learn best from collaboration and exploration ✦ Questions what normative values are reproduced by
installing proprietary software over F/OSS ✦ Kids as “emerging market” - educational vs. vocational
machine eliminates import of play a la John Dewey ✦ Exports Western economies/ideas on to Global South for
free (for now) ✦ Dovetailed on “exam economies”
OLPC Goes Global!
OLPC Goes Global?
Our own expert.
Hacking in Maine.
No. Really.
Local Wee Hackers
✦ Maine Learning Technology Initiative ✦ Created 2001 and reissues and expanded since then ✦ Now 29,000 laptops at use by 7th and 8th graders across
Maine, nights and weekends ✦ Contract was with Apple, now signed with HP in 2013
✦ Outcomes to date Create better writers Tech literacy improved No discernable effect on test scores
Next Class: Apr. 16✦ Today: visualizing social life (when
they let you) !
✦ Readings: Perer, Golbeck !
✦ Lab: 4/16 ggplot2, part deux !
✦ Hackathon 4/23(!) !
✦ DCSI lectures: David Stork on 4/21, Matt Wilson on 4/28 (req’d)