Spring 2024 History-APMA UN2901 section 001

DATA:PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

DATA:PAST, PRESENT AND FU

Call Number 17061
Day & Time
Location
MW 11:40am-12:55pm
303 Seeley W. Mudd Building
Points 3
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required None
Instructors chris wiggins - e-mail, homepage
Madisson Whitman
Type LECTURE
Method of Instruction In-Person
Course Description

Data-empowered algorithms are reshaping our professional, personal, and political realities, for good--and for bad. Data: Past, Present, and Future moves from the birth of statistics in the 18th century to the surveillance capitalism of the present day, covering racist eugenics, World War II cryptography, and creepy personalized advertising along the way. Rather than looking at ethics and history as separate from the science and engineering, the course integrates the teaching of algorithms and data manipulation with the political whirlwinds and ethical controversies from which those techniques emerged. We pair the introduction of technical developments with the shifting political and economic powers that encouraged and benefited from new capabilities. We couple primary and secondary readings on the history and ethics of data with computational work done largely with user-friendly Jupyter notebooks in Python.

Web Site Vergil
Department Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics
Enrollment 34 students (70 max) as of 3:05PM Wednesday, December 4, 2024
Subject History-APMA
Number UN2901
Section 001
Division Interfaculty
Open To Barnard College, Columbia College, Engineering:Undergraduate, General Studies
Section key 20241HSAM2901W001