Deadlines
Milestone 1: Three to five sentences summarizing your idea. Friday, May 2, 2025.
Milestone 2: Sketch (digital or drawn by hand) indicating the major components of your project, along with a paragraph explaining how each element will be accomplished technically. Friday, May 9, 2025.
Milestone 3: “Rough draft” of interactive resource (should include major components, though may need polishing or fine-tuning). Friday, May 30, 2025.
Milestone 4: Project due date + interactive in-class demo. Thursday, June 6, 2025.
Milestone 5: Reflection paper due via BruinLearn. Friday, June 13, 2025.
Description
When students are first learning about data, it can be challenging to convey to them that data is never neutral. Of course, as experienced DH practitioners, you already know this, but for newcomers, understanding this idea can be tricky. Often students can see how the substance of a dataset is skewed in one direction or another, but they frequently have trouble understanding that the very form of data entails a selective view of the world.
That’s why I want you to help me build a set of interactive resources to help convey this idea to them. Working in groups, you’ll create an interactive digital resource designed for your fellow undergrad students. The resource should convey some aspect of the “data is never neutral” idea, and it should evince a constructivist approach to learning. That is, it should in some way ask students to receive a new idea, take an active part in filtering it against their own experiences and knowledge, and emerge with a revised understanding of some phenomenon.
You could accomplish this goal in many different ways, and you’ll have to think creatively. Here are some ways you might approach it:
- an interactive case study of a historical episode in which data either further marginalized a group, or in which a group used data to push back against their own marginalization
- a “translation” of abstract ideas into a visual representation of general principles, which students can manipulate in some way
- an interactive story that uses an episode from your own experience to convey an idea
- an interactive visual representation of an article or essay that you believe is critical to understanding this idea
- an activity designed to demonstrate to students that the endeavor of recording data is inherently selective
- a “choose your own adventure” story designed to demonstrate some important aspect of this idea
- an activity in which students analyze and come to understand a primary source related to this topic
The resource can be designed to stand on its own, or it can be designed to accompany a lecture or other teaching scenario.
Here are some interactive projects and resources that I would classify as “constructivist.” (Note that many of these resources are much more elaborate than I would expect you to create in the time we have together!)
- Moral Machine
- Data by Design
- Activation Atlas
- Identifying Animals with AI
- Selfiecity
- Dollar Street
- Domestic Work (Gapminder)
- Stereoscope
- Atlas of Offshore Investment
- They Rule
- Hiroshima Archive
- Enslaved: People of the Historical Slave Trade
- I’m Still Surviving
- Furnace & Fugue
- Unsilencing Slavery
Together in class, we’ll learn to use the p5.js Javascript library, which will allow you to code your own interactive activity. However, if you have an idea for an activity that p5 can’t accomplish, talk to me, and we can discuss other technologies that might make sense for your project.