Data Driven Societies: What is Data???Professors Gaze & Gieseking

Data Today✦ Digitization ✦ Cheap storage ✦ Easy retrieval ✦ Global reach

✦ So...is everything data?✦ And is data everything?

http://pstrassmann.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-much-data-is-processed-in-servers.html

Example: The Cost of Data

The Cost of Data is Unequal

Debating Data

✦ “Data analytics can giev us stable financial systems, functional governments, efficient and affordable health care, and more.” - Alex Pentland

✦ “Data is an abstraction of real life, and real life can be complicated, but if you gather enough context, you can at least put forth a solidarity effort to make sense of it.” - Nathan Yau (not his best writing)

More about Wordpress

✦ Free & open source (versus proprietary) ✦ Build your own website/world✦ Theme options✦ Plugin functionality✦ User collaboration✦ Interactive and creative space

Course Website

Social Scientific Approach0. Identify an issue 1. Research question 2. Theoretical approach3. Literature review4. Methods5. Analysis 6. Discussion 7. Conclusion

Should our site be public?

✦ Pros: share with public, create portfolio of work, represent Bowdoin

✦ Cons: learning process

✦ We vote today!

Data scraping & Python✦ Data scraping is the process of gathering data from

another output via computer programming

✦ Programming languages require speaking to a computer in a way it understands

✦ Python is one of the most ubiquitous and useful programming languages today

✦ Free and open source software (F/OSS)