3 credits
Spring 2026 Lecture Upper Division
This course offers a long history of Big Data. The first module focuses on how states collected data from the 16th to 19th centuries. Here we will focus on mortality bills, census, statistics, and accounting tables. In the second model, we will pay special attention to data collection and privacy in the 20th century. In the third module, students will explore how previous developments in data collection were applied to the new developments in analog and digital computing. The final weeks of the course will focus on present-day artificial intelligence, big data, their technical limitations, and the ways they often amplify, exploit, and contribute to a wide array of social problems.
Learning Outcomes1Understand a variety of historical contexts that have shaped how we use, collect, and analyze data in the 21st century.
2Assess historical arguments about the place of data in the growth of state bureaucracies, colonialism, eugenics, national security, warfare, and scientific research made in scholarly secondary sources.
3Use primary sources to make arguments about the historical contingency of the ways practitioners have been using data to solve state problems.
4Develop critical thinking about data-empowered algorithms and envision a human-centered and ethical way of creating and implementing data technologies.
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