Defamiliarizing data
INFO 4747/5747
Defamiliarizing Data: The Ethnography and Design of Making Data Strange (4 CR)
A CU Global Seminar
A CU Global Seminar
Co-taught by: Dr. Amy Voida & Dr. Stephen Voida <amy.voida@colorado.edu & svoida@colorado.edu>
CU Education Abroad Advisor: Julie Roberts <Julie.Roberts-1@colorado.edu>
Please consult the CU Education Abroad site for the course and if you are interested in more information or are ready to apply... Email Us!
Course Description: This course introduces students to the study and design of data in an unfamiliar, international context. Develops students’ ethnographic and design skills for defamiliarizing data–seeing, characterizing, and designing for data in ways that render it as unfamiliar and strange in order to gain new perspectives and insights about those data and the contexts in which they are produced and consumed.
This course has been approved to satisfy the following:
Upper-division elective for INFO majors and minors
INFO BAM/MS elective (at the 5000-level)
Creative Technology and Design - Critical Perspectives in Technology Elective
Upper-division Data Science Minor elective
Upper-division CSCI elective
Humanities & Social Science Credit for engineering majors
Upper-division APPM elective
Upper-division SOCY elective
Summer 2025
Data may be everywhere, but in 2025, London will once again be our amazing home base for exploring data in a different cultural context. Here, we will explore the role of data in sites that quite literally set the standard for the rest of the world; in the country's contributions to computing and military history; and in its legendary storytelling!
Visit Bletchley Park, where teams of mathematicians, chess wizards, and crossword puzzle mavens broke the German Enigma code of WWII
Take a speed boat 'sea safari' to view the iconic White Cliffs of Dover while learning how data about yourself are defamiliarized in this new context
Explore behind-the-scenes at the Warner Bros’ Studio’s “The Making of Harry Potter,” where fictional design plays tricks with our expectations about data
Summer 2024
We launched INFO 4747 in London in the summer of 2024 with 8 amazing students in the inaugural class... In addition to the many experiences we shared as a class (check out the photos!), small teams of students split off to explore the role of data in a facet of British culture that interested them. Student projects in 2024 included:
About your Instructors!
Dr. Amy Voida and Dr. Steve Voida are both Associate Professors and Founding Faculty in the Department of Information Science. Amy studies the role of data in nonprofit organizations, particularly human service organizations that help some of the most marginalized among us. Steve designs personal health informatics systems for mental health and other chronic illnesses such as diabetes.
Amy & Steve are passionate about study abroad experiences, having spent several semesters abroad as students, themselves:
The summer after their freshman year, Steve and Amy attended a summer study abroad program together that was split between London and Dublin. They studied British and Irish literature and history and attended at least a dozen different shows in the evenings!
Amy spent a a semester during her senior year student teaching (as an education major) in an elementary school located on the NATO headquarters in Mons, Belgium. She taught a classroom full of multilingual third graders from all sorts of NATO countries and traveled somewhere new every weekend and holiday -- visiting Munich during Oktoberfest and Paris over winter break were highlights!
While in graduate school, Steve and Amy also spent a semester teaching at Georgia Tech's European Campus in Metz, France. Roadtrips to the see the beaches of Normandy and touring across Switzerland (through car-carrying train tunnels in the Alps) were highlights... not to mention the warm baguettes we picked up every morning from the local bakery! Ahhhhh.....
Be forewarned: Amy travels by following her sweet tooth and Steve is compelled to climb anything and everything that can possibly be climbed ;-)