Family Studies: A Data Humanities Seminar

Catalog description

This course is framed by the recognition that big data and social analysis are efforts to scale that can obscure the humans who are documented, enumerated, and analyzed. In the course, we will think with ethnographies and histories of the causes and consequences of counting humans, paying special attention to the ethics of collecting, analyzing, and publishing data. To ground our exploration of the human side of data, we will focus on personally meaningful scholarship: as a hands-on project, each student will tackle an individually relevant data project from a humanistic perspective, centering on their experience of family, from genealogical records to family photo albums to oral histories to quilting. This course bridges theory and methodology, asking why we count what we count — and what we miss when we invest too much in the counting.