Data Driven Societies: Visualizing Social Life (When They Let You)Professors Gieseking & Gaze

Recap: Cyborg Embodiment

• Cyborg - closing gap between human and machine

• Big data vs. small data of health care (Neff)

• Ex. Quantified Self • Social network analysis (SNA):

marketing, organizational effectiveness, disease outbreaks, uncover fraud, disrupt terrorist networks (Krebs)

SNA with Gephi

Hacking.

Doubting Hackers

The other side of hacking.

✦ Biella Coleman: anthropologist in STS, ethnographer of Anonymous

✦ Determines respect is earned with Anonymous::

informal, spontaneous, playful, and even lewd speech engaging in activist interventions, some of which are risky and illegal

Getting to Know You: Anonymous

✦ Does earning respect of a marginalized group make us a member of the group?

✦ Questions the borderlands between researched and researched once you become part of the field

✦ Ethnographer speaks to private lives of individuals to the public masses

Am I Anonymous?

✦ “Code as speech”

ethical, legal, cultural ramifications of restructuring

✦ F/OSS developers explore, contest, specify meaning of liberal freedom via free speech and development of new tools, legal and technical

✦ How these developments bolster legal expertise

Coding Freedom

http://codingfreedom.com/

Yet another side of hacking.

Yet another side of hacking.

OLPC

These Kids Today

✦ 77% have a cell phone ✦ 95% have internet

access ✦ 80% with internet

access use social media ✦ Average of 3,417 texts

per month from the

Pew Internet & American Life Project 2011-2012

digitaltrends.com

“Cookie Monsters”

✦ Katz & Donovan confront anxiety around children’s and youth’s use of computers: ✦ 1980s: Children can

overcome being programmed by a computer by learning to code

✦ 2000s: No Child Left Behind routinized exams over experiential learning with tech

Hacking Cookie Monsters

✦ Hacking - play, curious exploration, or as a puzzle solution that helps young people to better understand and control their environments (technological and otherwise)

—> hacking emerges as a site of invention and discovery as well as resistance to various technological fetters (p. 198) troyhunt.com

Ethics of Teaching Our Little Monsters to Hack

✦ Children learn best from collaboration and exploration ✦ Questions what normative values are reproduced by

installing proprietary software over F/OSS ✦ Kids as “emerging market” - educational vs. vocational

machine eliminates import of play a la John Dewey ✦ Exports Western economies/ideas on to Global South for

free (for now) ✦ Dovetailed on “exam economies”

OLPC Goes Global!

OLPC Goes Global?

Our own expert.

Hacking in Maine.

No. Really.

Local Wee Hackers

✦ Maine Learning Technology Initiative ✦ Created 2001 and reissues and expanded since then ✦ Now 29,000 laptops at use by 7th and 8th graders across

Maine, nights and weekends ✦ Contract was with Apple, now signed with HP in 2013

✦ Outcomes to date Create better writers Tech literacy improved No discernable effect on test scores

Next Class: Apr. 16✦ Today: visualizing social life (when

they let you) !

✦ Readings: Perer, Golbeck !

✦ Lab: 4/16 ggplot2, part deux !

✦ Hackathon 4/23(!) !

✦ DCSI lectures: David Stork on 4/21, Matt Wilson on 4/28 (req’d)