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Lecture 3

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chris wiggins edited this page Feb 5, 2018 · 21 revisions

Jan 29, 2018

readings

  1. 14 very readable pages from 2014 by Zeynep Tufekci on tech & politics. This will wrap up our "setting the stakes" readings on our data-driven present.

Tufekci, Zeynep. "Engineering the public: Big data, surveillance and computational politics." First Monday 19, no. 7 (2014).

https://data-ppf.slack.com/files/U3SJU2P6W/F8Z130KH9/tufekci.pdf

  1. 22 also very readable pages from 2007 by Sarah Igo. This will set the data (about people) in a historical context, looking at how it came to be that we collect and use data about people, for policy as well as marketing and other commercial ends.

Igo, Sarah Elizabeth. The averaged American: Surveys, citizens, and the making of a mass public. Harvard University Press, 2007.

https://data-ppf.slack.com/files/U3SJU2P6W/F8YHB0VRP/igo_the_averaged_american_introduction.pdf

  1. 29 frankly not-as-breezy-to-read pages from 1998 by Alain Desrosières.

This is the moment in our class when we take the most ancient step back in time, to a time before "Statistics" as a word had anything to do with numbers. The excerpt is Chapter 1 of "The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning" (2002 edition), an excellent and scholarly book on how statistical thinking came to be. We'll try to emulate the context-awareness of this history throughout the class, though most of the readings will be less "scholarly" and more readable.

Desrosières, Alain. The politics of large numbers: A history of statistical reasoning. Harvard University Press, 2002.

https://data-ppf.slack.com/files/U3SJU2P6W/F8YHB5KAM/desrosieres_the_politics_of_large_numbers_ch01.pdf

census, statistics, and "computational politics"

readings:

Desrosieres, Alain. "Prefects and Geometers" in The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998, ch 1. (book available through Slack)

Sarah Igo, The Averaged American (Harvard, 2007), introduction.

Zeynep Tufekci, 2014. Engineering the public: Big data, surveillance and computational politics, First Monday, Volume 19, Number 7 - 7 July 2014 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4901/4097

discussion:

  • vulcans, martians, and domain expertise
  • election of 2016: marketing and polling
  • A/B testing and causality

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