Big Data and Science Studies - The Center for Science and Society at Columbia University

RESEARCH CLUSTER: Big Data and Science Studies
LED BY: Matthew Jones, James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization
DESCRIPTION: Big Data and Science Studies brings together the new tools and techniques of large-scale digital humanities with the critical resources of science studies. The cluster connects the development of superior digital tools, and the care required in using them, to a critical historical and sociological account of the development of big data. This cluster focuses on the history and the social, political and ethical ramifications of data mining and big data. It connects historians, anthropologists, sociologists, legal scholars and journalists from Columbia and the broader metropolitan community. The cluster additionally provides a focal point for reflecting utilization of the new tools of the digital humanities within science studies, and thereby build upon and extend exciting new initiatives at Columbia, including the University’s growing Digital Humanities and Digital Social Science centers, and the Institute for Data Science (IDS). The cluster undertakes research projects, develop curriculum, and offer international workshops along both axes.
Current central research foci of the cluster include the history of data mining, from 1990-2010; the National Security Agency, Total Information Awareness and the history of big data; and “Digital Leibniz,” a project of topic modeling and network analysis of a late Renaissance polymath. Members of this cluster are deeply involved in crafting new courses at the intersection of the humanities and computing, including “Computing in Context,” developed with Adam Cannon and Julia Herschberg of Columbia’s Computer Science department, and Dennis Tenen of English; “Data and Databases,” developed as part of the Lede Program, Columbia School of Journalism; and “The Information Revolution,” a new lecture course designed to rethink how the history of computing from Babbage to the present is taught. Interested students are strongly encouraged to participate in new programs, such as the Lede initiative that provides students in the humanities with fundamental training in the data sciences.
UPCOMING EVENTS TBA
PREVIOUS EVENTS April 8, 2017; History of Visualization / Visualization in History Workshop February 23, 2017; Matthew Jones – Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage April 17 – 18, 2015; History of data / Data in history April 16, 2015; Frank Pasquale – The Fate of Social Science in a Black Box Society

RESEARCH CLUSTER: Big Data and Science Studies