Critical Data Studies
Critical Data Studies (CDS) at Purdue University is a multidisciplinary community of scholars examining the ethical, legal, social, cultural, political and epistemological aspects of data science, big data and digital infrastructures.We work to advance conversations on these issues and create opportunities for dialogue and collaboration among scholars, researchers, students and the public. As a collective, we are committed to feminist, antiracist and decolonizing pedagogies and practices.
At CDS, our goals are to:
-Create opportunities for public dialogue on key issues in critical data studies -Advance research in the field and cultivate opportunitites for scholarly collaborations -Promote student and faculty learning across campus through curriculum development and new learning initiatives
What We Do.
CDS Lecture and Seminar Series: Bringing CDS and Critical DH Research to a Wider Audience
The CDS Lecture and Seminar Series creates opportunities to engage the larger campus and Greater Lafayette community, which forms an essential component of our work. These lectures and seminars take on a variety of formats including large scale public lectures by distinguished scholars, roundtable discussions, panel presentations, and scholar and artist-led workshops that address key issues in critical data studies.
Curriculum Development & Learning Community
CDS faculty teach a variety of courses in Critical Data Studies and strive to cultivate new teaching and learning initiatives across campus such as our CDS-Data Mine Learning Community partnership — a living, learning-community for undergraduates, regardless of major, that helps students think critically about the cultural and political aspects of digital infrastructure, algorithmic decision-making and ubiquitous data collection through engagement with theory, creative computing, community and arts-based research, and public policy.
Queer Tech Futures Project
The goal of the Queer Tech Futures Project is to work with community partners to develop technology education and policy interventions that center the lives of queer and gender non-binary people. The project is based on the assumption that these types of collaborations situated within both analog and digital ‘making-and-telling’ practices can create vital opportunities to imagine inclusive and livable futures. The QTF team at Purdue has worked with partners to develop a series of critical game design workshops and speculative design hack-a-thons in collaboration with LGBTQ youth, and is developing an open educational resource to further engage community technology advocates and public policy makers. The QTF team at Purdue currently consists of Kendall Roark (Assistant Professor of Information Studies), Shannon McMullen (Associate Professor of Art and Design and American Studies) and Daphne Fauber (Libraries OUR Scholar 2019-2020). Past collaborators include Monica Arrambide (MAVEN Youth), MAVEN Youth Leaders and Ashlyn Sparrow (University of Chicago Game Changer Lab)
150 Years of Purdue Diversity
In 2019, for Purdue’s sesquicentennial year, students in the Digital and Print Archives course (ILS 695), taught by Professor Sammie Morris, collaborated to create a digital exhibit showcasing their archival research into the history of diversity at Purdue. Each student conducted independent research using print and digital archives, and then collaborated to bring their research together into an online exhibit using the DH tool Omeka.
PURR
The Purdue University Research Repository (PURR) is an institutional data repository that provides data management lifecycle support to faculty, staff, and students with tools for data management planning, collaboration and file sharing, data publication, archiving, and impact measurement. The PURR website makes Purdue research data easily findable and freely accessible, and is backed by the Libraries Research Data team that provides expert consulting and archiving services. Purdue researchers can use PURR’s self-service website to publish their own data, or utilize the research data team’s intensive data curation support services for large-scale publication projects. PURR aims to publish data from every department on campus, and has built successful partnerships with humanities researchers like Dr. Nicholas Rau in Classics who worked with PURR’s data curator to publish an interactive database of ancient pottery fragments with descriptions, detailed images, and GIS visualizations. The PURR team is also working with Dan Smith in Philosophy to publish an extensive collection of audio recordings, transcriptions, and translations of lectures given by famed philosopher Gilles Deleuze at the University of Paris VIII in the 1980’s.
Dino Felluga
The idea behind COVE was to bring together open-source tools in such a way that anyone, regardless of training, can start making use of the tools for their own research or in the classroom. I began in the Victorian period since I had the support of the main organizations dedicated to Victorian studies; however, the long-term goal is to expand to all literary fields and to other disciplines through an entity
dubbed SHORE.
We wish to create:
1) A viable publication work flow, including peer review and copy-editing;
2) Sustainable non-profit mechanisms for fund-generation;
3) Easy-to-use tools that work together effectively, including an annotation tool, a timeline-builder, a mapbuilder, and a gallery-builder;
4) Fully customizable content, drawing on over one million words of pre-coded primary texts (like the Lewis Carroll text to the right) and over one-million words of published
scholarship;
5) The ability to create course anthologies easily, thus saving students money;
6) Better support of undergraduate and graduate research;
7) A collective, centralized space where scholars can share their teaching and research. COVE and SHORE
For more on COVE: http://covecollective.org
Aaron Hoffman and Dwaine Jengelly
Many journalists dispute the connection between the sale of news and the coverage of news. Interview data we collected with journalists suggest that the tone of coverage is linked to the issues they cover not with sales, a view consistent with some existing research on journalism norms. However, in our recent paper, “Does bottom-line pressure make terrorism coverage more negative? Evidence from a twenty-newspaper panel study” published in Media, War & Conflict, Aaron Hoffman and I find some evidence that the tone of terrorism reporting is linked to newspaper owners relationship to profit. Newspapers with owners with short-term views on profit publish more negative terrorism coverage than newspapers with owners that took a long-term view on profits. Examining both climate change and terrorism coverage allows us to measure if events matter while still testing the economic pressure hypothesis. Climate change and terrorism are connected to how humans perceive threats to their security. Terrorism is more likely to raise journalists’ awareness of the threat and cause them to report on subject more negatively than climate change which often do not induce immediate awareness of mortality.
Operational Mapping and Analytics (OPMAPS)
Sorin Adam Matei, Professor of Communication, Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Education
Robert Kirchubel, Operations Director FORCES initiative
Jonathan Poggie, Professor of Aeronautical Engineering, OPMAPS Project
Operational Mapping and Analytics (OPMAPS) is a multidisciplinary project at Purdue to digitize historical and contemporary military maps and to create new methods of statistical analysis. The interactive opmaps facilitate interpreting military operations retrospectively and prospectively. The OPMAPS analytic tools identify main flows of movement, points of most likely attack, or most likely points for a breakthrough while highlighting the logic of battle, the missed opportunities and the degree to which a battle was won by sheer force or by its skillful use. Chiefly using primary source materials, OPMAPS makes highly detailed editable, manipulable and query-able animated maps to assist civilian and military teachers and scholars convey this complex subject matter.
Matthew Hannah and Jean-Pierre Herubel
Matthew Hannah and Jean-Pierre Herubel (PULSIS) are mapping the rise of periodical studies by analyzing the keyword co-appearance of almost 1000 journal articles in the field. Collecting data from a bibliography of journal publications in the field of periodical studies produced a dataset of some 1000 articles. We then collected a dataset of all keywords used for these publications. Mapping the co-appearance of keywords will help us analyze the broader disciplinary formations in the field. Preliminary results show a rigorously interdisciplinary focus (much like DH).
Mapping Postcolonial Literature
Yiqiu “Echo” Yan and Matthew Hannah
Supported by Purdue’s Office of Undergraduate research, Mapping Postcolonial Literature is a collaboration between a faculty member and an undergraduate. Matthew Hannah and Yiqiu “Echo” Yan constructed a corpus of 20 postcolonial novels in Hathi Trust’s Digital Library. Because space and place are so central to the political issues in colonialism and post-colonialism, we wanted to track all locations mentioned in a collection of novels important in this field. We then used named-entity-recognition algorithms to scrape location data and mapped it in an interactive geospatial map. It is our hope that scholars and students will be able to use this resource to explore the key sites in the postcolonial novel.
Purdue Day of DH 2020 