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Semester 1

Ethics and Politics of Data (EFIE08004)

Subject

Edinburgh Futures Institute

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

1

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Please see Additional Restrictions below.

Course Summary

The story of data helps us better understand the growing power of data in today's world. This course asks the question 'what are data, and how do they come to be?' Working collaboratively, students from across the disciplines will uncover the moral and political values that shape human practices of counting, measuring, and labelling reality, in the process developing the foundational skills of critical and responsible data practice.

Course Description

This course asks and answers the question 'what are data, and how do they come to be?' The story of data reveals the moral and political values that shape human practices of counting, measuring, and labelling reality, and helps us better understand the growing power of data in today's world. Designed to engage students across the disciplines, this introductory course offers a foundational integration of basic concepts and methods of data science with the historical and philosophical context that reveals their ethical and political dimensions as inseparable from their scientific value. The course draws from the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, history, mathematics, computer science and the design arts to build up a more comprehensive picture of how data are constructed, interpreted, shared and used for a growing range of scientific, commercial, public and creative purposes. **The course content begins with a general introduction to the concept of data and its historical origins and uses, building up to an outline of the core data concepts and methods increasingly that increasingly shape contemporary society. In the second course phase, ethical and political theories of justice, power, identity, consent, and rights are used to further contextualise our relationships to data. The third phase reveals how naïve views about the relationship between data and reality have often led to failed scientific endeavours and harmful social and political outcomes. In the fourth and final phase, students use the conceptual tools they have acquired to practice identifying and correcting these limited perspectives on data. (These four phases are overlapping and enmeshed, rather than cleanly demarcated; the progression represents the dominant theme/emphasis of each course phase). Throughout the course, 2 hour seminars are structured to accomplish 1) short (30-40 min) lectures on historical, moral and political context of a data practice; 2) an active discussion (45 minutes) of theoretical frames, concepts and critical tools from the reading as they apply to the practice; 3) presentation and discussion (30 min) of an artefact, technique or case study related to the data practice that will be the subject of an autonomous learning group task (1 hour weekly). **By engaging in discussion-centered seminars and working collaboratively in autonomous learning groups on well-defined critical and analytical tasks related to the seminar content, students will experience the transformation from a passive understanding of data and a data-driven society, to a habit of active, collaborative and critical engagement with data and how they are constructed and used to promote particular social and political values, goals and arrangements. This habit is the cornerstone of the mature data philosophy that students will build throughout their EFI journey, as they acquire and practice the critical data skills needed for the responsible and trustworthy use of data across a wide range of academic and professional settings.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0%

Additional Restrictions

This course must be taken on a Pass/Fail basis only, so students will not receive a specific mark or grade for this course. It is your responsibility to ensure this course is accepted by your home institution as Pass/Fail, and you must replace this course with another before the relevant Course Change Deadline if it is not.

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