Inclusive Data Science News

Reacting to Reacting to the Past

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 18:48:49 +0000

Reacting to Reacting to the Past Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/21/2022 - 12:48

Z MacLean

“Games are fun, but they don’t really belong in higher education,” is something I, who would take any opportunity to make a task entertaining, would have said prior to participating in a Reacting to the Past conference. It has always been difficult in my mind to be comfortable intersecting the ideas of education and entertainment in a college classroom. The fact that I am paying good money to receive knowledge and skills that will provide more options in my future seems to imply that fun and games don’t belong in the classroom. After all, why would they? What can a game teach me that a long and in-depth lecture cannot?

In brief, Reacting to the Past is an active pedagogy that involves instructors and students playing elaborate games designed for higher education. Predominantly, these games are set in the past, and the students involved are assigned roles informed by primary texts assigned to them by the instructor who takes the role of the Game Master. There is no fixed script nor is there typically an outcome that must align with actual historical events. All that is required is for students to adhere to the philosophical and intellectual beliefs of the historical figures they are roleplaying. How the students act is completely up to them as they express their characters through speeches, papers, public presentations, newspaper articles, or in-character conversations with their peers. All of the aforementioned mediums are in pursuit of some in-game goal that, once accomplished, will cause their character to ‘win’ the game.

It was with this mindset that I volunteered to help fill in a slot for a game titled Memory and Monument Building: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1980-1982. All I was given at first was a document detailing the type of role I would be playing in the game, some information on the Vietnam Memorial, and an explicit set of guidelines and rules that would facilitate the game so that everyone would be safe while dealing with the complex and difficult issues the game would make its participants face. These guidelines and rules included a prohibition on accents, a banning of chronistic use of language such as slurs or slang, specific hand signs to make while speaking to inform your fellow players that you do not mean what you are saying and are strictly speaking in character. I was personally very relieved to see that the game designers had taken into consideration the challenging nature of playing a role and provided detailed and effective ways to manage the difficulties that may arise.

Showing up the very next day after doing a cursory reading of the material provided to me, I sat down with the professional historians, professors, and extremely well-learned individuals attending the Reacting to the Past Summer Conference. This was an event where, only a day before, I had been staffing and cleaning tables. To say I was nervous would be an understatement. Nevertheless, my first experience with “Reacting” began. The rules were laid out, some introductory thought exercises were done, and we began to play.

I will skip the details of play, its intricacies, or my strategy to have my character ‘win’ the game, and focus on the more important element I took away: games do have a place in a college classroom. It is entirely possible to design an experience such that students can learn about course content while simultaneously engaging the competitive parts of their brains via the gamification of education. Reacting accomplished this through tying the student’s success to an embodied understanding of the information the instructor wants their class to understand.

This goes beyond the preparation required for an exam or essay, as each student is recreating the journey of an individual character. This incentivizes them to read the materials they are presented more deeply, not only to give them a chance to “win,” but to inform the experience they are building. While I had a very busy schedule during the time I was participating in the game, I still fought to find time to brush up on the Vietnam Memorial and the newspaper articles the “Game Master” sent via email. I knew this would give the speeches I gave in character more grounding in the subject matter and would help the game feel more real by extension. To do well in the “Reacting” pedagogy—and to ‘win’—a student must fully commit to their class, the materials the instructor provides, outside textbooks, and online resources, all while immersing themselves in the historical context of the game. All of this combines into a pedagogy in which a game is being played, yet course information and knowledge is still being acquired, analyzed, processed, and implemented by the student. What more could an instructor want?

While this style of education may not fit in every type of classroom in the collegiate world, it has the potential to fit most. Where there is any analysis of a past event with more than roughly ten historical actors involved, a “Reacting” style pedagogy can be deployed to grant students a deeper understanding of the complex issues at play. And it is these classes that make my previous theory that “games are fun, but they don’t really belong in higher education” null and void. I am very happy to have been shown how wrong I was.

Student reflection piece of the RTTP conference.

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Interdisciplinary Cross-College Team Receives National Endowment for the Humanities Award

Anonymous — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 19:26:51 +0000

Interdisciplinary Cross-College Team Receives National Endowment for the Humanities Award Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/13/2022 - 13:26

The ASSETT (Arts & Sciences Support of Education Through Technology) Innovation Incubator is thrilled to announce that a team of Arts and Sciences faculty has won a $150,000 Humanities Connections Implementation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This project, titled “Humanities Core Competencies as Data Acumen: Integrating Humanities and Data Science,” aims to develop a curricular initiative at the University of Colorado Boulder that enhances both the humanities and data science by developing courses that are equally rooted in each discipline. The awarded team members are Project Director Jane Garrity (English), and Co-PIs Robin Burke (CMCI Lead), David Glimp (English), Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara (CRDDS), Vilja Hulden (History), Thea Lindquist (CRDDS), Henry Lovejoy (History), Brett Melbourne (Evolutionary Biology), Nathan Pieplow (Program for Writing & Rhetoric), Rachael Deagman Simonetta (English), and Eric Vance (Applied Math). In addition to the Innovation Incubator Inclusive Data Science team, this project will be supported by faculty from the College of Media, Communications & Information (CMCI) and the Center for Research Data & Digital Scholarship (CRDDS).

During the three-year period of the NEH award, team members will design eight courses, each of which will promote experiential learning and foster engagement with humanistic questions in the context of quantitative inquiry. Two additional key components of the project will be: a two-year course design and development workshop facilitated by ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ’s Center for Teaching and Learning; and an ambitious plan for disseminating key findings in order to cultivate local and national conversations about the most effective ways of teaching data science and the humanities. The project aims to provide a model of cutting-edge pedagogical collaboration and an example of how the humanities can help equip twenty-first century learners with the intellectual resources they will need responsibly to inhabit a world being remade by data.

Prior to winning the NEH, the ASSETT Inclusive Data Science team members Garrity, Glimp, Hulden, Melbourne, Pieplow, and Vance launched a new introductory course, Interdisciplinary Data Science for All (AHUM 1825), that was team taught for the first time by Professors Glimp and Vance in Fall 2021. In this class students learned to analyze not just numbers, but to communicate the findings of data analysis effectively by highlighting human contexts and consequences. The course provides STEM majors with qualitative reasoning skills that are traditionally taught in the humanities, provides future humanities majors with an on-ramp to further study of data science, and provides all students with critical, statistical and computational skills they can apply in future courses and in the workforce. The Inclusive Data Science ASSETT team has also co-written an article, “Integrating the Humanities into Data Science Education: Reimagining the Introductory Data Science Course” that is forthcoming in the Statistics Education Research Journal. In addition, in 2021 the team won a three-year $300,000 National Science Foundation grant for their proposal, “Integrating Content and Skills from the Humanities into Data Science Education.” The animating insight of this and the NEH project is that essential data science competencies complement—and benefit from being integrated with—core humanities competencies.

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Meet the Creators of the Incarceration Transparency Database

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 19:26:10 +0000

Meet the Creators of the Incarceration Transparency Database Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/03/2022 - 12:26

Andrea Armstrong , Blair Young

On Wednesday, March 9, 2022 from 12-1pm MDT, Join the ASSETT Innovation Incubator Inclusive Data Science team and the Center for Research Data & Digital Scholarship (CRDDS) for a virtual panel discussion with Professor Andrea Armstrong, Professor Judson Mitchell and student collaborators from Loyola University New Orleans on their collaborative effort to create the Incarceration Transparency database.

The Incarceration Transparency project is a direct response to family members, advocates, and journalists seeking to understand the context in which a person died behind bars. With a mission to publicly share data and research to address significant harms from conditions of incarceration in Louisiana, the website hosts a database with an open data API that provides facility-level deaths behind bars — both who died and why they died.

“At this project’s core”, shares Meredith Booker who, as a student, helped launch the database project, “each point is a person, who came from a family and community. This has always been the grounding point for all who work on the project. Every individual who has died behind bars was first and foremost a person whose story deserves to be told and understood by the society who decided to send them to jail or prison”.

As Dr. Armstrong created a list for New Orleans and East Baton Rouge parish jails in partnership with the Promise of Justice Initiative she discovered that, without the broader context of deaths in other Louisiana jails, it was difficult to assess whether deaths in those two facilities were consistent with other jails or whether there were particular problems at those facilities that increased the risk of death. Concurrently, law school pedagogy was increasingly turning towards experiential education and the benefits of "learning by doing." Filing public records requests and negotiating with government officials are two core skills that many lawyers use in practice, but are difficult to teach in a doctrinal classroom. This project addressed these two gaps in knowledge — community knowledge on deaths and law student knowledge on public records/negotiation — by creating a seminar to obtain the records the community members needed.

The database development forced Dr. Armstrong’s collaborative team of faculty and students to specifically identify which pieces of information for each death was important — calling upon the diverse areas of expertise of each team member. Dr. Armstrong had little technical or coding expertise, yet she knew which data points would be most useful for identifying death trends and analysis. Conversely, Dr. Mitchell had the technical expertise to create the database, but did not have the subject-matter expertise on incarceration conditions. Student John Halfacre focused on making the data and information collected accessible to the general public. While student Meredith Booker contributed her prior experience as a class participant to developing standard protocols for students contributing to the project and streamlining data collection.

“The Incarceration Transparency is an incredible example of how we can leverage digital tools, open data, and data visualizations, to foster change where we know there is injustice”, comments Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Director of Digital Scholarship, CRDDS. “Further, the project rehumanizes the people who died behind bars in Louisiana, through pictures and short biographies — it’s powerful to see some of the faces and spirits behind the numbers.” .

Though the project is centered around death records and memorials for people who died behind bars, it also affirms the dignity of those who died by publicly acknowledging their deaths in society’s institutions. For some families, with whom the team worked to provide additional information and records, the project provided the first in-depth knowledge of their loved one’s death. An embodiment of using research, expertise, and learning for the greater good, the database itself is free, publicly available and contains all of the original underlying documents, in hope that it will be helpful to other academic researchers as well.

Meet the Panelists

Professor Andrea Armstrong joined the Loyola University New Orleans, College of Law faculty in 2010 where she is a Law ��ý�Ļ��Ʒing Committee Distinguished Professor of Law. She is a leading national expert on prison and jail conditions and is certified by the U.S. Department of Justice as a Prison Rape Elimination Act auditor. Prof. Armstrong founded IncarcerationTransparency.org, a website that provides facility-level deaths behind bars data and analysis for Louisiana and memorializes lives lost behind bars. Her research has been profiled by New Yorker Magazine and quoted in the New York Times, the Atlantic, National Public Radio, and the Times-Picayune among others. Her scholarship focuses on the constitutional dimensions of prisons and jails, specifically prison labor practices, the intersection of race and conditions of incarceration, and public oversight of detention facilities. She teaches in the related fields of incarceration law and policy, constitutional law, criminal law and procedure, law and poverty, and race and the law. Professor Armstrong is a graduate of Yale Law School (JD), the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (MPA), and New York University (BA).

R. Judson Mitchell is a Clinical Professor at Loyola College of Law, New Orleans. His areas of expertise are Criminal Defense and Technological Innovation in Law. Prof. Mitchell is the creator of the legal case management software, Clinic Cases, and he also designed and now teaches a unique Technology and Legal Innovation Clinic. The students in this clinic were instrumental in creating the Incarceration Transparency website and database.

John Halfacre is a 2020 graduate of Loyola University New Orleans, College of Law. While in law school, he participated in the technology and legal innovation clinic with Professor Mitchell and Professor Armstrong. Alongside his classmates, John worked directly on the design and content of the Incarceration Transparency website. John is currently a practicing attorney specializing in criminal defense and personal injury in the New Orleans area. Before attending law school, John founded a marketing company that provided search engine optimization and website design services for clients worldwide. John received his B.A. in Criminal Justice from Loyola University New Orleans in 2010, graduating Cum Laude. Before attending college, John served in the United States Coast Guard, conducting search and rescue and law enforcement missions.

Meredith Booker (she/her) is a third year law student at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. Meredith has obtained a Master of Public Policy with a concentration in law, crime, and policy from Oregon State University and a B.S. in Criminal Justice and B.A. in Sociology from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. Prior to law school, Meredith worked for U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley as a legislative aide on a variety of issues, including criminal justice, civil rights, and immigration. While in law school, Meredith has completed internships with Michigan Legal Services and the Detroit Justice Center, an externship with the Promise of Justice Initiative, has served on the board of the law school’s National Lawyers Guild chapter, and is now the Managing Editor, Online for the Loyola Law Review. Meredith took Professor Armstrong’s Incarceration Law course during the Fall of her 2L year and has continued to work with Professor Armstrong on the Incarceration Transparency project as her Research Assistant and Teaching Assistant for the course.

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Weapons of Math Destruction author Cathy O’Neil to speak on February 23, 2022!

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 18:38:57 +0000

Weapons of Math Destruction author Cathy O’Neil to speak on February 23, 2022! Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 02/11/2022 - 11:38

Blair Young

As part of their CODE:SWITCH speaker series, the ASSETT (Arts & Sciences Support of Education Through Technology) Innovation Incubator Inclusive Data Science team is thrilled to host a keynote talk by Cathy O’Neil author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. O’Neil will deliver her virtual keynote, sponsored by DataIku, the ASSET Innovation Incubator, and the ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ Department of English, on Wednesday, February 23, 2022 from 12-1pm MDT.

In her New York Times bestselling book “Weapons of Math Destruction,”O’Neil describes how widely used AI is across industries such as financial services, healthcare, and the judicial system. A variety of models make conclusions that significantly impact individuals and communities, but often in an opaque and unaccountable manner. In the past 5 years, investigations have revealed the negative impacts of biased AI, exposing the critical need for transparency and integrity throughout the entire data science lifecycle. As biased data moves through a black box model that is deployed with little insight into how it was built, bias and unfairness is compounded over the entire cycle.

Most organizations do not intend to produce biased AI, but their lack of oversight and transparency in the process of building and deploying models leads to unintentional consequences. As AI becomes more ubiquitous with organizations, mitigating bias and encouraging the responsible, inclusive use of AI is essential.

“Cathy O’Neil is among the most important contemporary voices alerting us to the risks embedded in machine learning technologies,” notes David Glimp, Associate Professor of English at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ and member of the ASSETT Innovation Incubator Inclusive Data Science Team. “Her book, Weapons of Math Destruction, has had a huge impact. Her clear and compelling analysis has contributed significantly to the urgent project of critically analyzing the impact algorithmic technologies have on our daily lives. O’Neil has helped energize a generation of scholars and practitioners working to develop responsible approaches to data science.”

More About Cathy O’Neil

Cathy O’Neil earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard and worked as a math professor at Barnard College before switching over to the private sector, working as a quant for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw and as a data scientist in the New York start-up scene. She is a regular contributor to Bloomberg Opinion and in 2016 wrote the book Weapons of Math Destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. She is the CEO of ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company, is a member of the Public Interest Tech Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her new book The Shame Machine: who profits in the new age of humiliation is coming out in March 2022.

More About Headlining Sponsor, DataIku

Dataiku is the platform for Everyday AI that provides customers with the tools and technology that form the basis for well governed and Responsible AI, ensuring that models are accountable, architecture and infrastructure is sustainable, and data processes are transparent. The Dataiku Academic Program enables students to succeed in the data-driven world. Dataiku provides free access to its fully integrated data science, machine learning, and AI platform. On top of providing the technology, Dataiku also hosts several student enrichment programs, project competitions, and access to monthly webinars and events. Learn more by visiting their website.

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CODED BIAS Virtual Watch Party featuring Q&A with Director Shalini Kantayya!

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 21:10:44 +0000

CODED BIAS Virtual Watch Party featuring Q&A with Director Shalini Kantayya! Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/15/2021 - 15:10

Blair Young

Join the ASSETT Innovation Incubator Inclusive Data Science team for their 2021-22 CODE:SWITCH speaker series kick-off featuring a virtual watch part of the CODED BIAS documentary and Q&A with director Shalani Kantayya on Wednesday, October 13, 2021 from 7:00-8:30pm

Coded Bias explores the fallout of MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini´s startling discovery that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces and women accurately, and her journey to push for the first-ever legislation in the U.S. to govern against bias in the algorithms that impact us all.

Modern society sits at the intersection of two crucial questions: What does it mean when artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly governs our liberties? And what are the consequences for the people AI is biased against ? When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers the most facial-recognition software does not accurately identify darker-skinned faces and the faces of women, she delves into an investigation of widespread bias in algorithms. As it turns out, artificial intelligence is not neutral, and women are leading the charge to ensure our civil rights are protected.

ABOUT DIRECTOR SHALANI KANTAYYA

Filmmaker Shalini Kantayya´s Coded Bias, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. She directed for the National Geographic television series Breakthrough, Excecutive Produced by Ron Howard, broadcast globally in June 2017. Her debut, Catching the Sun, premiered at the LA Film Festival and was named a NY Times Critick´s Pick. Catching the Sun released globally on Netflix on Earth Day 2016 with Executive Producer Leonardo Di Caprio, and was nominated for the Environmental Media Association Award of the Best Documentary. Kantayya is a TED Fellow, a William J. Fullbright Scholar, and an Associate of the UC Berkley Graduate School of Journalism.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE TRAILER

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FUTUREPROOF Author Kevin Roose to speak in October!

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 21:04:58 +0000

FUTUREPROOF Author Kevin Roose to speak in October! Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/15/2021 - 15:04

Blair Young

Join the ASSETT Innovation Incubator Inclusive Data Science team for their 2021-22 CODE:SWITCH speaker series kick-off featuring a virtual keynote by Kevin Roose on Wednesday, October 13, 2021 from 2:30-3:30pm

This event is co-sponsored by ASSETT and the President’s Fund for the Humanities.

Kevin Roose is an award-winning technology columnist for The New York Times and the best-selling author of three books, Futureproof, Young Money, and The Unlikely Disciple. His column, "The Shift", examines the intersection of tech, business, and culture. He is a regular guest on The Daily, and appears regularly on leading TV and radio shows. He writes and speaks regularly on many topics, including automation and A.I., social media, disinformation and cybersecurity, and digital wellness.

Worried that he was not ready for a world dominated by AI, automation, and mind-morphing algorithms, Kevin decided to do what reporters do: He interviewed experts, read a ton of books and papers, and went in search of answers. The result was his latest book, Futureproof: a guide to surviving the technological future.

FUTUREPROOF: RULES FOR HUMANS IN THE AGE OF AUTOMATION

T A few years ago, New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose realized he wasn’t ready for the automation age. And, in fact, nobody was. Tech companies were using AI to boost their power and profits. Politicians and pundits were debating whether or not robots would destroy millions of jobs. The media was holding Silicon Valley’s feet to the fire. But nobody was asking one important question: How should we prepare for the future?

Based on his new book, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, Kevin Roose answers that question. Based on new reporting, interviews with experts, and centuries’ worth of history, Roose’s guide to the future will help you stay ahead of AI, protect your job from robots, and live a happy, fulfilling life in the machine age by rediscovering your biggest asset: your humanity.

MORE ABOUT KEVIN

Kevin's first job in journalism was unique: as a sophomore in college, he took a semester off and went undercover at Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s evangelical Christian school. His goal was to figure out what life was like among people who he considered his polar opposite. From his experience came his first book, The Unlikely Disciple, a memoir of a strange and enlightening semester “abroad.”

After college, Kevin joined The New York Times, followed by New York magazine, and wrote a second book: Young Money, which chronicled the lives of 8 junior Wall Street investment bankers right after the 2008 financial crisis. Before rejoining The Times in 2017, Kevin produced and co-hosted a TV documentary series about technology, called Real Future.

At The Times, Kevin writes about technology and its effects on society. Recently, that has meant a lot of coverage of companies like Facebook and YouTube, as well as profiles of internet personalities like PewDiePie, and social phenomena like online radicalization and workplace automation.

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ASSETT Innovation Incubator Inclusive Data Science Team Receives National Science Foundation Award

Anonymous — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 16:53:18 +0000

ASSETT Innovation Incubator Inclusive Data Science Team Receives National Science Foundation Award Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/02/2021 - 10:53

The ASSETT (Arts & Sciences Support of Education Through Technology) Innovation Incubator is thrilled to announce that the Inclusive Data Science team was recently awarded a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education for their project, CODE:SWITCH (Collaborative Data Science Education: Statistics With Integration of Technology, Computing, and the Humanities) which aims to radically rethink undergraduate data science education. The project’s goal is to develop and assess new pedagogical approaches to teaching data science that effectively integrate perspectives of both STEM and humanities disciplines. The awarded team includes Principal Investigator (PI) Eric Vance (Applied Math), co-PIs David Glimp (English), Vilja Hulden (History), Nathan Pieplow (Program for Writing & Rhetoric), and Jessica Alzen (Center for Assessment Design Research and Evaluation), and Senior Personnel Jane Garrity (English) and Brett Melbourne (Evolutionary Biology).

This fall 2021, the team launched a new, team taught introductory course, Interdisciplinary Data Science for All (AHUM 1825), fully enrolled with 66 undergraduate students. In this course, students are learning to analyze not just numbers, but their human contexts and consequences; to prevent intentional or unintentional misuse of data science; and to communicate the findings of data analysis effectively — a set of competencies known as “data acumen.” The course uses real-world social issues to teach important statistics and coding skills alongside ways of thinking from the humanities, including careful textual analysis, rigorous attention to the kinds of categories people use to think about the world, close scrutiny of data sources, critical awareness of the harms and benefits of data collection and analysis, and assessment of the rhetorical aims and strategies of those who use data in politics and policymaking. The course provides STEM majors with qualitative reasoning skills that are traditionally taught in the humanities, provides future humanities majors with an on-ramp to further study of data science, and provides all students with critical, statistical and computational skills they can apply in future courses and in the workforce.

NSF funds will enable the team to study the effectiveness of the new course to determine how its educational model can be improved, adapted, and ultimately implemented at other colleges and universities. By crafting a more inclusive and human-centered approach to teaching the foundations of data science, and by developing a new collaborative model of data science education that can be adapted nationwide, this research team hopes to positively impact STEM education, leading to a more diverse, creative, and innovative national workforce and a more STEM-literate public.

ASSETT Innovation Incubator Inclusive Data Science Team Receives National Science Foundation Award for their Project, CODE:SWITCH (Collaborative Data Science Education: Statistics With Integration of Technology, Computing, and the Humanities)

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New Interdisciplinary Data Science for All course!

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 15:17:09 +0000

New Interdisciplinary Data Science for All course! Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/21/2021 - 09:17

The ASSETT Innovation Incubator Inclusive Data Science team’s new Interdisciplinary Data Science for All course (AHUM 1825) is open for enrollment for fall 2021! AHUM 1825 is a hands-on course designed to teach students the basics of computational inquiry while also developing a critical understanding of the assumptions, risks, and ethical challenges inherent in the work of data scientists.

This team- taught course blends humanistic perspectives with statistical inquiry and coding principles in order to provide both a foundation for further work in the field and to encourage critical questioning of how we interpret and use data — a critical 21st century skill for all ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ students.

AHUM 1825 has no prerequisites and assumes no prior experience with statistics or coding. The course satisfies either a Quantitative Reasoning and Mathematical Skills requirement or the Arts and Humanities General Education Distribution Requirement (but not both) in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Learn more about the course and course registration

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Innovative Data Science Course Approved for Fall 2021

Anonymous — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 22:32:30 +0000

Innovative Data Science Course Approved for Fall 2021 Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/13/2020 - 15:32

Michael Schneider

Data exist all around us, from the tweets flying by on social media to the groceries being scanned at the market. This growing wealth of information, known as Big Data, provides exciting opportunities for transforming our economy, reshaping our political and social lives and impacting many, if not most, disciplines across the academy.

But the excitement surrounding Big Data needs to be tempered by understanding its limitations. As history instructor Vilja Hulden notes “Big Data is good at answering what, but we need the humanities to help us figure out how and why.” To understand the full story behind the data, a new introductory data science course, Interdisciplinary Data Science for All (AHUM 1825), aims to empower students to view data through a humanist lens and to see the humanity within data.

Big Data is good at answering what, but we need the humanities to help us figure out how and why.
–Vilja Hulden, Instructor of History

The course is being developed by an interdisciplinary team of arts & sciences faculty, with the support of ASSETT’s Innovation Incubator. As Eric Vance, an associate professor of applied mathematics and director of the Lab for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis (LISA), describes it, the course will empower students to “learn and apply humanities ways of thinking, statistical thinking, and computing to get to the heart of data to uncover the true story of data."

Associate Professor of English David Glimpadds: “The class will provide students from the arts and humanities an opportunity to develop the data literacy that will be vital for engaged citizenship in the 21st century. By the same token, Interdisciplinary Data Science for All will help students from STEM backgrounds see the value of humanistic attention to the complexity and variety of the human experience.”

This approach differs from the traditional introductory data science curriculum, which instructs students on how to apply data analysis but leaves the ethical concerns of why until higher-level courses. The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine advise academic institutions to "ensure that ethics is woven into the data science curriculum from the beginning and throughout," rather than placing ethics on a back burner, to be addressed when and if time allows.

Team member Nathan Pieplow, associate director of the Global Studies Residential Academic Program (RAP) and an instructor in the Program for Writing & Rhetoric, observes: “It's high time we recognized that data scientists need to be humanists, and humanists need to be data scientists. AHUM 1825 is going to break down the boundary between the qualitative and quantitative. This is the kind of course that will get [students] thinking about knowledge and problem-solving in a new way.”

AHUM 1825 is going to break down the boundary between the qualitative and quantitative. This is the kind of course that will get [students] thinking about knowledge and problem-solving in a new way.
– Nathan Pieplow, Associate Director, Global Residential Academic Program (GRAP)

Preparations are still underway for teaching this new course on inclusive data science in fall 2021, so please stay tuned for further details as they become available.

The ASSETT Innovation Incubator, which supported the creation of AHUM 1825, is a three-year pilot that provides a safe, resourced environment in which the arts and sciences community can grow innovative teaching and learning ideas. Via the incubator, funds provided by the College of Arts & Sciences and ASSETT support four interdisciplinary teams: Multimodal Participatory Publishing, Metacognition + Well Being, Student Success, and Inclusive Data Science. The Inclusive Data Science team is cultivating an interdisciplinary platform for data science at the university by working to weave humanistic forms of inquiry throughout the data science curriculum.

For more information about the course, the Inclusive Data Science initiative, or the Innovation Incubator, contact Shane Schwikert, data analytics and applied learning sciences manager, or Blair Young, innovation catalyst. For more information about ASSETT, visit www.colorado.edu/assett.

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