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---
title: Data Stories 2019
image: https://i.imgur.com/dMei2U9.png
tags: syllabus, data, carnegie mellon, christopher warren, cmu english
---
![](https://i.imgur.com/ac88suc.png)
# DATA STORIES F2019
updated 11/19/2019
ENGL 76-314/714
Prof. Christopher Warren
cnwarren@cmu.edu
Carnegie Mellon University
Literary and Cultural Studies
M, W 10:30-11:50
Gates & Hillman Centers 5222
Fall 2019
Office Hours: Thursdays 1:30-3:30 (Baker 245M)
Digital Humanities Office Hours: Wednesdays 1-4 (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*. 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.
* Shakespeare, William. *Othello*.
* 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 - Wednesday October 9th](#SHORT-FORM-DATA-STORY-DUE-in-class) - 25%
- [x] [STUDENT PRESENTATION - Wednesday November 13th](#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 - Wednesday December 11](#FINAL-LONGFORM-DATA-STORY-DUE-5-pm) - 30%
- [x]ATTENDANCE AND PARTICIPATION - 10%
## PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE OF ASSIGNMENTS
**MONDAY 8/26/19 (MEETING 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
>"For fruits and veggies, there’s organic. For coffee and clothes, there’s fair trade. Now, algorithms have their own certification mark: a seal of approval that designates them as accurate, unbiased, and fair." - Katherine Schwab, ["This logo is like an 'organic' sticker for algorithms"](https://www.fastcompany.com/90172734/this-logo-is-like-an-organic-sticker-for-algorithms-that-arent-evil), 2018
Pre-read:
* Weingart, Scott B. “The Route of a Text Message, a Love Story.” *Vice*, February 22, 2019 (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kzdn8n/the-route-of-a-text-message-a-love-story).
Introductions
Class Exercise: A Farm-to-Table Data Story
Discussion: Why Narrate?
**WEDNESDAY 8/28/19 (MEETING 2)**
**FARM TO TABLE (1)**
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
* 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
* Valentino-DeVries, Jennifer, Natasha Singer, Michael H. Keller, and Aaron Krolik. “Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret.” *The New York Times*, December 10, 2018, sec. Business, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html
* 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
**WEDNESDAY 9/4/19 (MEETING 3)**
**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>
**MONDAY 9/9/19 (MEETING 4)**
**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**
**WEDNESDAY 9/11/19 (MEETING 5)**
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]
* D’Ignazio, Catherine. “Putting Data Back into Context.” *DataJournalism*. 2019. https://datajournalism.com/read/longreads/putting-data-back-into-context.
* 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]
**MONDAY 9/16/19 (MEETING 6)**
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>
* 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/
**WEDNESDAY 9/18/19 (MEETING 7)**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:
![](https://i.imgur.com/RZcHCcs.jpg =250x)* Ted Chiang, *The Lifecycle of Software Objects* [Canvas]
**HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES**
![](https://i.imgur.com/5ywm2aP.jpg)
Archive box of Oxford English Dictionary quotation slips, late 19th/early 20th century [[British Library]](http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/large126816.html)
**MONDAY 9/23/19 (MEETING 8)**
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
* Dan Bouk, from *How Our Days Became Numbered*
**WEDNESDAY 9/25/19 (MEETING 9)**
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
**MONDAY 9/30/19 (MEETING 10)**
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*
**WEDNESDAY 10/2/19 (MEETING 11)**
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*
> ![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Snow-cholera-map-1.jpg =500x)
**MONDAY 10/7/19 (MEETING 12)**
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"
* 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
### SHORT FORM DATA STORY DUE (in class)
**WEDNESDAY 10/9/19 (MEETING 13)**
**IN CLASS**
* SHORT FORM DATA STORY DUE
* Playing ReWordable
<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)]
**MONDAY 10/14/19 (MEETING 14)**
**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>
**WEDNESDAY 10/16/19 (MEETING 15)**
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
**MONDAY 10/21/19 (MEETING 16)**
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
* "Feminist Data Visualization with Catherine D’Ignazio" [podcast, 0:51:51], https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/data-stories-podcast/data-stories/e/52329685?autoplay=true
* <iframe style="border: solid 1px #dedede;" src="https://app.stitcher.com/splayer/f/39714/52329685" width="220" height="150" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>
* 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
**WEDNESDAY 10/22/19 (MEETING 17)**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:
* Gleick, *The Information*, Ch. 4 (Babbage and Lovelace chapter)
* Roald Dahl, "The Great Automatic Grammatizator"
* Arthur C. Clarke, "Steam-Powered Word Processor"
**MONDAY 10/28/19 (MEETING 18)**
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"
> ![](https://i.imgur.com/MC5s4CK.jpg)
[comment]: # (Excerpt from Benjamin Blatt, *Nabakov's Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing*)
**WEDNESDAY 10/30/19 (MEETING 19)**
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/
**MONDAY 11/4/19 (MEETING 20)**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:
* ![](https://i.imgur.com/Eb5xjqy.jpg =150x) * Robin Sloan, *Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore*
**WEDNESDAY 11/6/19 (MEETING 21)**
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.
![](https://media1.tenor.com/images/3ba78c3b7dcb64bbfe6b557e8e642b18/tenor.gif?itemid=6224975)
**MONDAY 11/11/19 (MEETING 22)**
ASSIGNMENT DUE:
* Ingrid Burrington, *Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure*
### STUDENT PRESENTATIONS
**WEDNESDAY 11/13/19 (MEETING 23)**
Choose One:
**How to Publish Your Data Story in...**
- [ ] The Atlantic
- [ ] [The Cut > Science of Us](https://www.thecut.com/scienceofus/)
- [ ] [Bitch > internets](https://www.bitchmedia.org/topic/internets)
- [ ] 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
- [ ] [The Pudding](https://pudding.cool/)
- [ ] Wired
- [ ] "Raw Data" is an Oxymoron, vol. 2
- [ ] Comparable Publication/Resource of Your Choice
**MONDAY 11/18/19 (MEETING 24)**
* Ryan Calo, "Digital Market Manipulation"
* State Of New Mexico v. Tiny Lab Productions; Twitter Inc.; Mopub, Inc.; Google, Inc.; Admob, Inc.; Aerserv Llc; Inmobi Pte Ltd.; Applovin Corporation; And Ironsource Usa, Inc. [complaint] https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/295-new-mexico-kid-apps-complaint/206d4ea39896e264fe3a/optimized/full.pdf
**WEDNESDAY 11/20/19 (MEETING 25)**
**ARCHIVES**
![](https://i.imgur.com/WfkdPtX.jpg =150x)
* 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
**MONDAY 11/25/19 (MEETING 26)**
~~**ARCHIVES**~~ NO CLASS - PREPARE FINAL DATA STORIES
ASSIGNMENT DUE:
~~* Rosen, Jody. “The Day the Music Burned.” The New York Times, June 11, 2019, sec. Magazine https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html.~~
>
**THURSDAY November 28, 2018 THANKSGIVING**
**MONDAY 12/2/19 (MEETING 27)**
~~ASSIGNMENT DUE: DRAFT LONGFORM DATA STORY PRESENTATIONS~~
IN-CLASS INFORMAL LONGFORM DATA STORY PRESENTATIONS + CONVERSATION (3 MINS, UNGRADED)
**TUESDAY 12/3/19 by NOON**
UPLOAD DRAFT LONGFORM DATA STORY FOR PEER-REVIEW (CANVAS)
**WEDNESDAY 12/4/19 (MEETING 28)**
~~ASSIGNMENT DUE: DRAFT LONGFORM DATA STORY PRESENTATIONS~~
LONG-FORM DATA STORY PEER REVIEWS
TO HAND-IN: a peer-review ARTIFACT (comments, annotated draft, etc.)
**WEDNESDAY 12/11/19**
### 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/
* 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/
* 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/.
* 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/
* 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
* Anna Grimshaw, *At Low Tide*
* 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.
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**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.