Data and Writing Toward Social Change

Catalog description

This course focuses on critical evaluation of data in application to writing projects that students will produce in class. Students will explore questions such as: What counts as “data”? By whom? Are data “neutral”? What is the range of possibilities to communicate and write with data? What are important rhetorical considerations at all stages of the lifecycle of data (e.g., collection, cleaning, analysis, interpretation, communication)? What is the “status quo” of data and how does that include and exclude marginalized groups like women, people of color, disabled people, and LGBTQ people? Students will get practice working with data-driven texts produced by others (e.g., academics, journalists) and basic descriptive statistics to consider various rhetorical considerations in creating data-driven arguments and narratives in a variety of genres for a variety of audiences. No expertise in data science or statistics is required or expected. However, students with coursework in those and related fields are welcomed