In this connector course, we will explore how historical data becomes historical evidence and how recent technological advances affect long-established practices, such as close attention to historical context and contingency. Will the advent of fast computing and big data make history “count” more or lead to unprecedented insights into the study of change over time? During our weekly discussions, we will apply what we learn in lectures and labs to the analysis of selected historical sources and get an understanding of constructing historical datasets.

The data we collect both reflects our values and shapes them, constraining and defining the questions we ask about our society. This course will use a series of case studies from the history of American data to examine a wide array of political, economic, and cultural issues. We will explore the ways that categories, units of analysis, and practices of instruction and collection both reflect and reshape assumptions about race, gender, labor, and household structure.

On February 19, 1942, Executive Order 9066 authorized the detention of around 110,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens living on the west coast. On the basis of ethnicity alone, having committed no crime, and given no trial, they were stripped of their rights and forcibly relocated to several detention centers, where they lived for up to four years surrounded by barbed wire and watched by armed guards. Many documents, images, and other materials that survive from this terrible episode of U.S. history are now available online. In this data science connector course, students will learn emerging digital methods for conducting historical research, which they will apply to the study of Japanese-American Internment. Classroom exercises will be hands-on and involve working directly with primary sources, using and expanding upon skills learned in the Foundations of Data Science class.

Increasingly, humanity’s cultural material is being captured and stored in the form of electronic text. From historical documents, literature and poems, diaries, political speeches, and government documents, to emails, text messages, and social media, students from the humanities and social sciences now have access to immense amounts of rich, and diverse, text. This course will introduce students to cutting edge ways of structuring, analyzing, and interpreting digitized text-as-data, and will do so by exploring questions fundamental to the humanities and social sciences.