---
title: Data Stories
image: https://i.imgur.com/dMei2U9.png
tags: syllabus, data, carnegie mellon, christopher warren, cmu english
---


# DATA STORIES

ENGL 76-314/714
Prof. Christopher Warren
[e-mail]
Carnegie Mellon University
Literary and Cultural Studies
Tu, Th 10:30-11:50
Wean Hall 5316
Fall 2018
Office Hours: Wednesdays 3-5 (Baker 245M)
Digital Humanities Office Hours: Wednesdays 12-3 (Sorrels Den, 4400 Wean)

> “Delving into someone else’s infrastructure has about the entertainment value of reading the yellow pages of the phone book. One does not encounter the dramatic stories of battle and victory, of mystery and discovery that make for a good read” - Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, [*Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences*](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/sorting-things-out)

> "Other than the humiliation of having my house raided by law enforcement, I have genuine concerns for my safety should someone come directly to my house because of this faulty data...It's like having a target pointed directly at you. I feel like I'm sitting on a time bomb" - Tony Pav, Ashburn, VA, quoted by Kashmir Hill in ["How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell"](https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turned-a-random-kansas-f-1793856052)

> "We need stories...that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections" - Donna Harroway, "Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin" [[pdf]](http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol6/6.7.pdf)

TABLE OF CONTENTS
-
[TOC]

WHAT STUDENTS CAN EXPECT FROM THE COURSE
-

Students at the end of the course should be able to:

- Detail cases in contemporary culture and historical contexts alike of the people, standards, technologies, and infrastructures responsible for collecting, maintaining, and transmitting data.
- Assess contemporary writing about data through the lens of narratology.
- Analyze ways that data of various kinds facilitate and/or frustrate narrativization.
- Develop and complete individualized long-form research and writing projects informed by contemporary developments in data studies, journalism, and art.

HOW WILL WE KNOW IF WE'VE SUCCEEDED?
-

Ultimately, the course will be a success if students start to write about data the way Michael Pollan writes about food.

BOOKS
-
* Burrington, Ingrid. *Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure*. Ill edition. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2016.
* Gitelman, Lisa. *“Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron*. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013.
* Gleick, James. *The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood*. New York: Vintage, 2012.
* Johnson, Steven. *The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic-and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World*. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.
* Rosenberg, Daniel, and Anthony Grafton. *Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline*. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.
* Sloan, Robin. *Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel*. Picador, 2013.

MAJOR DUE DATES & PERCENTAGES OF GRADE
-
- [x] [SHORT FORM DATA STORY ~1400 words - Tuesday October 9th](#SHORT-FORM-DATA-STORY-DUE-in-class) - 25%
- [x] [STUDENT PRESENTATION - Thursday November 15th](#STUDENT-PRESENTATIONS) - 20%
- [x] [DRAFT LONGFORM DATA STORY PRESENTATION - Tuesday December 4/Thursday December 6](#FINAL-LONGFORM-DATA-STORY-DUE-5-pm) - 15%
- [x] [LONGFORM DATA STORY ~ 4000-6000 words - Thursday December 13](#FINAL-LONGFORM-DATA-STORY-DUE-5-pm) - 30%
- [x]ATTENDANCE AND PARTICIPATION - 10%

## PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE OF ASSIGNMENTS

**TUESDAY August 28, 2018**
**FARM TO TABLE (1)**
>"Food that comes with a story—whether it’s organic, fairly traded, humanely grown, sustainably caught or whatever—represents a not-so-implicit challenge to every other product in the supermarket that dares not narrate its path from farm to table." - Michael Pollan, ["Produce Politics"](https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/the-way-we-live-now-produce-politics/), 2001

ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Michael Pollan, "Produce Politics," https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/the-way-we-live-now-produce-politics/
* Lois Beckett, "Everything We Know About What Data Brokers Know About You," *ProPublica* (2014), https://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-about-what-data-brokers-know-about-you
* Ian Bogost, "My Cow Game Extracted Your Facebook Data", *The Atlantic* (2018), https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/my-cow-game-extracted-your-facebook-data/556214/
* Kashmir Hill, "How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell," https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turned-a-random-kansas-f-1793856052

**THURSDAY August 30, 2018**
**FARM TO TABLE (2)**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Frank Pasquale, *The Black Box Society*, Ch. 2, "Digital Reputation in an Era of Runaway Data", pp.19-58
* Michael Pollan, "Big Organic" from *The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals*, pp. 134-184
* Ribes and Jackson, "Data Bite Man: The Work of Sustaining a Long-Term Study" in *"Raw Data" is an Oxymoron*, pp. 147-166
* Ingrid Burrington, "From Server Farm to Data Table", 33C3 (2016),

> <iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/33C3-From_Server_Farm_to_Data_Table" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" allowfullscreen></iframe>

**TUESDAY September 4, 2018**
**FARM TO TABLE (3)**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Hayden White, "Explanation by Emplotment" from *Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe* (1973), pp.7-11
* Miriam Posner, "See No Evil," *Logic Magazine*, https://logicmag.io/04-see-no-evil/
* danah boyd and Kate Crawford, "Critical Questions for Big Data"
* John Cheever, “The Enormous Radio" [Canvas]
* Arkansas vs. James Andrew Bates [search warrant], http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3473740-Arkansas-vs-James-Andrew-Bates-Amazon-Echo-and.html

**SELECTED RESEARCH METHODS**

**THURSDAY September 6, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Complaint, National Fair Housing Alliance v. Facebook, US District Court, SDNY, https://nationalfairhousing.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/NFHA-v.-Facebook.-Complaint-w-Exhibits-March-27-Final-pdf.pdf
* Bowker and Star, *Sorting Things Out*, Ch. 1, "Some Tricks of the Trade in Analyzing Classification" [Canvas]
* Adrian Chen, "The Agency", *New York Times Magazine* (2015), https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html
* Holt, Bossler, and Seigfried-Spellar, "Acquisition and Examination of Forensic Evidence," from *Cybercrime and Digital Forensics*, pp. 527-570 [Canvas]

**TUESDAY September 11, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Taeyoon Choi, "CPU Dumplings", https://taeyoonchoi.com/poetic-computation/cpu-dumplings/
> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kF6o4EJ07IE?rel=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

* Katherine Schwab, "This logo is like an 'organic' sticker for algorithms," *Fast Company* (2018), https://www.fastcompany.com/90172734/this-logo-is-like-an-organic-sticker-for-algorithms-that-arent-evil
* Stephen Marche, "What Happens When an Algorithm Helps Write Science Fiction," Wired (2017), https://www.wired.com/2017/12/when-an-algorithm-helps-write-science-fiction/
* Alexis Madrigal, "How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood," https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-netflix-reverse-engineered-hollywood/282679/
* (a.) "Machine Bias with Jeff Larson," *Data Stories* [podcast] (http://datastori.es/85-machine-bias-with-jeff-larson/) OR (b.) Angwin and Larson, "How We Analyzed the COMPAS Recidivism Algorithm," https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compas-recidivism-algorithm [UPDATED Permalink: https://perma.cc/622Y-45WG]
> <iframe style="border: solid 1px #dedede;" src="https://app.stitcher.com/splayer/f/39714/48055711" width="220" height="150" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>
* Brian Clifton, Sam Lavigne and Francis Tseng, *White Collar Crime Risk Zones* (March 2017), https://whitecollar.thenewinquiry.com/

**THURSDAY September 13, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:
* Ted Chiang, *The Lifecycle of Software Objects* [Canvas]

**HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES**

Archive box of Oxford English Dictionary quotation slips, late 19th/early 20th century [[British Library]](http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/large126816.html)

**TUESDAY September 18, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* 1 Chronicles 21:1-18 (KJV), https://www.biblestudytools.com/kjv/1-chronicles/passage/?q=1-chronicles+21:1-18
* Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, *Cartographies of Time*, Chs. 1 and 2

**THURSDAY September 20, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Daniel Rosenberg, "Data before the Fact" in *"Raw Data" is an Oxymoron*
* William Shakespeare, *Othello* (1603), Folger Digital Texts, https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/download/index.html?filter=Othello

**TUESDAY September 25, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Gleick, *The Information*, pp. 51-77
* Scott Weingart, "Cetus," *The Scottbot Irregular* (2016), http://scottbot.net/cetus/
* Matthew Stanley, "Where Is That Moon, Anyway? The Problem of Interpreting Historical Solar Eclipse Observations" in *"Raw Data" is an Oxymoron*

**THURSDAY September 27, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Steven Johnson, *The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic-and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World*

> 

**TUESDAY October 2, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Ellen Gruber Garvey, "Facts and FACTS: abolitionists' database innovations" in *"Raw Data" is an Oxymoron*
* Catherine D'Ignazio, "The Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute: A Case Study in Civic Mapping," https://civic.mit.edu/2013/08/07/the-detroit-geographic-expedition-and-institute-a-case-study-in-civic-mapping/
* Larry Sanger, "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir"

**THURSDAY October 4, 2018 DATA & ANONYMITY with VISITING SPEAKER Alessandro Acquisti
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Latanya Sweeney, "Simple Demographics Often Identify People Uniquely"
* Robert Hackett, "Researchers Caused an Uproar By Publishing Data From 70,000 OkCupid Users," http://fortune.com/2016/05/18/okcupid-data-research/
* Andrew Liptak, "Strava’s fitness tracker heat map reveals the location of military bases," *The Verge* (2018), https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/28/16942626/strava-fitness-tracker-heat-map-military-base-internet-of-things-geolocation
* Norman Paradis, "The Golden State Killer case shows how swiftly we’re losing genetic privacy," *Vox* (2018), https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/5/3/17313796/genetic-privacy-killer-golden-state-serial-killer-genealogy-genome
* BONUS TECHNICAL SUPPLEMENT: "Collateral damage of Facebook Apps: an enhanced privacy scoring model"

> 

**TUESDAY October 9, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

### SHORT FORM DATA STORY DUE (in class)

**IN CLASS**
**LABOR**
> <iframe src="https://search.alexanderstreet.com/embed/token/05q66oj5eprnocpm64oj6d1g" frameborder="0" width="470" height="390" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<a data-flickr-embed="true" data-header="true" data-footer="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonnygoldstein/albums/72157659791797068" title="Interrogating Algorithms"><img src="https://farm1.staticflickr.com/714/21770796674_c3e64db3e6_z.jpg" width="640" height="480" alt="Interrogating Algorithms"></a>

[illustration: Johnny Goldstein, "Interrogating Algorithms", Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)]

**THURSDAY October 11, 2018**
**LABOR**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Virginia Eubanks, *Automating Inequality*, Ch. 4, "The Allegheny Algorithm," pp. 127-173
* Russell, Andrew, and Lee Vinsel. "Hail the Maintainers." Aeon (2016), https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more
* Mattew Kirschenbaum, "Unseen Hands," in *Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing*, 139-165
* Lilly Irani, "Difference and Dependence among Digital Workers: The Case of Amazon Mechanical Turk," *South Atlantic Quarterly* (2015), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273109578_Difference_and_Dependence_among_Digital_Workers_The_Case_of_Amazon_Mechanical_Turk
* Ciaran Cassidey and Adrian Chen, The Moderators [Documentary], https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/16/15305562/the-moderators-documentary
> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/k9m0axUDpro?rel=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

**TUESDAY October 16, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Exploring art (through selfies) with Google Arts & Culture, https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/arts-culture/exploring-art-through-selfies-google-arts-culture/
* Ally Marotti, "Google's art selfies aren't available in Illinois. Here's why." Chicago Tribune, http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-google-art-selfies-20180116-story.html
* Ayana Lage, "Google’s 'Arts & Culture' App Is Being Called Racist, But The Problem Goes Beyond The Actual App" *Bustle*, https://www.bustle.com/p/googles-arts-culture-app-is-being-called-racist-but-the-problem-goes-beyond-the-actual-app-7929384

**THURSDAY October 18, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Mimi Onuohu, "The Point of Collection", *Points*, https://points.datasociety.net/the-point-of-collection-8ee44ad7c2fa
* Mimi Onuohu, "Missing Datasets", https://github.com/MimiOnuoha/missing-datasets
* Caroline Sinders, "Feminist Data Set," http://soho20gallery.com/caroline-sinders-feminist-data-set/
* Katharine Schwab, "This Designer Is Fighting Back Against Bad Data–With Feminism,"" *Fast Company*, https://www.fastcompany.com/90168266/the-designer-fighting-back-against-bad-data-with-feminism

**TUESDAY October 23, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Gleick, *The Information*, (Babbage and Lovelace chapter)
* Alison Parish, "Programming Rewordable: A Tale of Computer-Assisted Word Game Design" (2016), *Medium*, https://medium.com/@aparrish/programming-rewordable-a-tale-of-computer-assisted-word-game-design-dafaa31b5c77
* Roald Dahl, "The Great Automatic Grammatizator"
* Arthur C. Clarke, "Steam-Powered Word Processor"

**THURSDAY October 25, 2018**
**CLASS DISCUSSION WITH BENJAMIN BLATT** [tentative]
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

Excerpt from Benjamin Blatt, *Nabakov's Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing*

**TUESDAY October 30, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, *Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture*, pp. 15-17, 55-66
* Chalmers, Melissa K., and Paul N. Edwards. “Producing ‘One Vast Index’: Google Book Search as an Algorithmic System.” Big Data & Society 4, no. 2 (2017)
* Scott Rosenberg, "How Google Book Search Got Lost," *Wired*, https://www.wired.com/2017/04/how-google-book-search-got-lost/

**THURSDAY November 1, 2018** **CLASS DISCUSSION WITH ROBIN SLOAN**

ASSIGNMENT DUE:

*  * Robin Sloan, *Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore*

**TUESDAY November 6, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Robin Sloan, *Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore* (cont.)

**THURSDAY November 8, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Interview with Caitlin Smallwood (Netflix) from *Data Scientists at Work*
* Ed Finn, "House of Cards: The Aesthetics of Abstraction" in *What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing*, 87-112
* *Nosedive*, *Black Mirror*. Netflix.


**TUESDAY November 13, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* Ingrid Burrington, *Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure*
* Ryan Calo, "Digital Market Manipulation"
* Mar Cabra and Erin Kissane, "The People and Tech Behind the Panama Papers: How Long-Term Infrastructure-Building Enabled the Biggest Leak in Data Journalism History," https://source.opennews.org/articles/people-and-tech-behind-panama-papers/

**THURSDAY November 15, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

### STUDENT PRESENTATIONS

Choose One:

**How to Publish Your Data Story in...**

- [ ] The Atlantic
- [ ] Big Data and Society
- [ ] [Beyond Citation: Critical Thinking About Digital Research](https://www.beyondcitation.org/)
- [ ] Jacobin
- [ ] The Markup
- [ ] Library and Information History
- [ ] Logic Magazine
- [ ] Media, Culture, and Society
- [ ] Nature [Futures Science Fiction]
- [ ] New Inquiry
- [ ] Wired
- [ ] "Raw Data" is an Oxymoron, vol. 2
- [ ] Comparable Publication/Resource of Your Choice

**TUESDAY November 20, 2018**
**ARCHIVES**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:

* L. Annette Binder, "Dead Languages" from *Rise*
* Jill Lepore, "The Cobweb: Can the Internet Be Archived?", *The New Yorker* (2015), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb"
* Glenn Fleishman, "Archiving a Website for 10,000 Years," *The Atlantic* (2016), https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/archiving-a-website-for-ten-thousand-years/482385/?utm_source=atltw

>

**THURSDAY November 22, 2018 THANKSGIVING**

**TUESDAY November 27, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE: NO CLASS - INDEPENDENT WORK ON LONGFORM DATA STORY

**THURSDAY November 29, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE: NO CLASS - INDEPENDENT WORK ON LONGFORM DATA STORY

**TUESDAY December 4, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE: DRAFT LONGFORM DATA STORY PRESENTATIONS

**THURSDAY December 6, 2018**
ASSIGNMENT DUE: DRAFT LONGFORM DATA STORY PRESENTATIONS

**THURSDAY December 13, 2018**

### FINAL LONGFORM DATA STORY DUE 5 pm

---

## ADDITIONAL RESOURCES (AKA, STUFF I WANTED TO INCLUDE BUT COULDN'T MANAGE TO FIT IN)

* Jer Thorp, "The Weight of Data"
> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q9wcvFkWpsM?rel=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

* Alexander, Leo. “The Treatment of Shock from Prolonged Exposure to Cold, Especially in Water.” 1945. [Report on Data derived from Nazi medical experiments] https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/special_books/16.
* "Big data problems we face today can be traced to the social ordering practices of the 19th century," http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/10/13/ideological-inheritances-in-the-data-revolution/
* Amatriain, Xavier. “Big & Personal: Data and Models Behind Netflix Recommendations.” In Proceedings of the 2Nd International Workshop on Big Data, Streams and Heterogeneous Source Mining: Algorithms, Systems, Programming Models and Applications, 1–6. BigMine ’13. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1145/2501221.2501222.
* Angwin, Julia and Surya Mattu. “Amazon Says It Puts Customers First. But Its Pricing….” Text/html. ProPublica, September 20, 2016. https://www.propublica.org/article/amazon-says-it-puts-customers-first-but-its-pricing-algorithm-doesnt.
* Angwin, Julia and Surya Mattu. “How We Analyzed Amazon’s Shopping Algorithm.” Text/html. ProPublica, September 20, 2016. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-amazons-shopping-algorithm.
* BBC Scotland, "The Secret Rules of Modern Living: Algorithms", https://www.netflix.com/watch/80095881?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C0%2C9ab8dcad9b19ddb24dbd49ea26607340907961ca%3A36a5345c2df4604a4a0aa711200dea370da825ce%2C%2C
* Bellanova, Rocco, and Gloria González Fuster. “No (Big) Data, No Fiction? Thinking Surveillance With/Against Netflix.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, January 1, 2018. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3120038.
* Blum, Andrew. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. HarperCollins, 2014.
* Bounegru, Liliana, Tommaso Venturini, Jonathan Gray, and Mathieu Jacomy. “Narrating Networks.” Digital Journalism 5, no. 6 (July 3, 2017): 699–730. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2016.1186497.
* Brier, Steve and Eileen Clancy. Beyond Citation: Critical Thinking About Digital Research, https://www.beyondcitation.org/
* Burrington, Ingrid. Where the Internet is Located, http://videos.theconference.se/ingrid-burrington-where-the-internet-is-located (9:54)
* Byrnes, Kevin. Harvest. Indevu Fims, 2016. https://vimeo.com/189449163.

> <iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/189449163?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>

* Carroll, Matt. “Spotlight Shines on a Spreadsheet.” MIT Technology Review. Accessed August 27, 2018. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601545/a-spreadsheets-star-turn/.
* Chiang, Ted. Stories of Your Life and Others, 2016.
* Courtland, Rachel. “Bias Detectives: The Researchers Striving to Make Algorithms Fair.” Nature, June 20, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05469-3.
* Dourish, Paul. The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information. 1 edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2017.
* Eggers, Dave. The Circle. Penguin, 2013.
* Fama, Katherine A. “Domestic Data and Feminist Momentum: The Narrative Accounting of Helen Stuart Campbell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” Studies in American Naturalism 12, no. 1 (November 3, 2017): 105–26. https://doi.org/10.1353/san.2017.0006.
* Fulsom, Ed. "Database as Genre"
* Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition
* Gutierrez, Sebastian. Data Scientists at Work. Berkeley, Calif.: Apress, 2014.
* Hedstrom, Margaret. Epistemic Infrastructure in the Rise of the Knowledge Economy 1, 2018.
* Hicks, Marie. Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing. 1 edition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.
* Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016.
* Ignatius, David. The Quantum Spy: A Thriller.W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.
* Irani, L. C., and M. S. Silberman. “Turkopticon: Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk,” October 31, 2015. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/10c125z3.
* Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
* Kitchen, Rob. "Big Data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts"
* Lowell, Spencer, and Text By Malia Wollan. “Arks of the Apocalypse.” The New York Times, July 13, 2017, sec. Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/magazine/seed-vault-extinction-banks-arks-of-the-apocalypse.html.
* Lupi, Giorgia, Stefanie Posavec, and Maria Popova. Dear Data. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2016.
* Lupi, Giorgia. “Data Humanism” https://medium.com/@giorgialupi/data-humanism-the-revolution-will-be-visualized-31486a30dbfb
* Martinez, Antonio Garcia. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. New York: Harper, 2016.
* Miéville, China. Embassytown. London: Macmillan, 2011.
* Moe, Kristine. “Should the Nazi Research Data Be Cited?” The Hastings Center Report 14, no. 6 (1984): 5–7. https://doi.org/10.2307/3561733.
* Mussell, Jim. “Doing and Making: History as Digital Practice.” In *History in the Digital Age*, edited by Toni Weller, 79–94. Routledge, 2013.
* Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press, 2018.
* O’Beirne, Justin. “Google Maps’s Moat,” 2017. https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/.
* O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. London: Penguin Books, 2018.
* Paglen, Trevor. Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. Updated edition. New York, N.Y.: Berkley, 2010.
* Post, Stephen G. “The Echo of Nuremberg: Nazi Data and Ethics.” Journal of Medical Ethics 17, no. 1 (1991): 42–44.
* Pipkin, Everest. "It Was Raining in the Data Center", https://medium.com/s/story/it-was-raining-in-the-data-center-9e1525c37cc3
* Putnam, Lara. “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast.” The American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (April 1, 2016): 377–402. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.2.377.
* Rothman, Joshua. “The Many Lives of Iron Mountain.” The New Yorker, October 9, 2013. https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-many-lives-of-iron-mountain.
* Schäfer, Mirko Tobias, and Karin Van Es, eds. The Datafied Society: Studying Culture through Data. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017.
* Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
* Stern, Joanna. “Facebook Really Is Spying on You, Just Not Through Your Phone’s Mic.” Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2018, sec. Tech. https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-really-is-spying-on-you-just-not-through-your-phones-mic-1520448644.
* Tseng, Francis, and Willie Osterweil. “The Founder.” The New Inquiry (blog), November 14, 2017. https://thenewinquiry.com/the-founder/.
* Wernimont, Jacqueline. “Privacy, Security, and Your ‘Data Shadow.’” HASTAC. https://www.hastac.org/blogs/jacqueline-wernimont/2018/02/09/privacy-security-and-your-data-shadow.
* Jennifer Egan, "Great Rock and Roll Pauses, by Alison Blake" from *A Visit From the Goon Squad* (2010), https://www.scribd.com/document/52497593/Extract-A-Visit-from-the-Goon-Squad-by-Jennifer-Egan
* Claire Voon, "Artists Covertly Scan Bust of Nefertiti and Release the Data for Free Online," Hyperallergic (2016), https://hyperallergic.com/274635/artists-covertly-scan-bust-of-nefertiti-and-release-the-data-for-free-online/
* Claire Voon, "Could the Nefertiti Scan Be a Hoax — and Does that Matter?", Hyperallergic (2016), https://hyperallergic.com/281739/could-the-nefertiti-scan-be-a-hoax-and-does-that-matter/
* Cory Arcangel, "The Warhol Files: Andy Warhol's Long-Lost Computer Graphics," *ARTFORUM* (2014), https://www.artforum.com/print/201406/the-warhol-files-andy-warhol-s-long-lost-computer-graphics-46874

**ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS**
I'm grateful to many students, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances for helpful suggestions for this syllabus. I especially want to thank Everest Pipkin, Shannon Mattern, Nathan Pensky, Matt Burton, Scott Weingart, Molly Steenson, Anupam Basu, Dan Shore, and Ted Underwood. I've borrowed considerably from Shannon Mattern's own "Data Archive Infrastructure" [syllabus](http://www.wordsinspace.net/data_archive/fall2018/) for The New School, from Jacob Gaboury's UC Berkeley [syllabus [pdf]](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56675ef925981d4412e0a14e/t/5b7c6cba4d7a9ce1a7d9b8cd/1534880954623/Gaboury+-+Film+240+-+Politics+of+Code.pdf) for "The Politics of Code," and from Molly Wright Steenson's Carnegie Mellon School of Design [syllabus](https://medium.com/@maximolly/syllabus-interaction-and-service-design-concepts-2018-541c9be39e44) for "Interaction and Service Design Concepts," and I thank all of them and many other interlocutors (formal and informal) for their generosity.