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INFO 4747/5747
INFO 4747/5747
Defamiliarizing Data: The Ethnography and Design of Making Data Strange (4 CR)
A CU Global Seminar
Defamiliarizing Data: The Ethnography and Design of Making Data Strange (4 CR)
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 course requirements in three different colleges:
Upper-division elective for INFO majors and minors
INFO BAM/MS elective (at the 5000-level)
Upper-division Data Science minor elective
Upper-division CEAS Humanities & Social Science elective
Creative Technology and Design - Critical Perspectives in Technology elective
Upper-division CSCI elective
Upper-division Data Science Minor elective
Upper-division APPM elective
Upper-division SOCY elective
Upper-division Data Science Minor elective
Just looking for an amazing upper-division elective? There are no major restrictions; we love having students from any and all majors in our class! So far, we've also traveled with music majors, art practices majors, and psychology majors. Come join us!
Summer 2026
For 2026 only, INFO 4747 will be held in Sydney, AU and Auckland, NZ! Data, after all, is everywhere! We'll explore Hobbiton and Weta Workshop and learn how fiction helps us explore our technological futures. We'll board the HMS Endeavor and learn about its colonial influence on information visualization. We'll visit with the members of the First Nations and learn about the role of the land in indigenous information management. We'll float through glow worm caves and traverse redwood treetops while investigating how data about ourselves are experienced differently in another culture.
Summer 2025
In 2025, we returned to London, UK with 13 students from six different majors across three different colleges—information science, computer science, creative technology and design, aerospace engineering, psychology, and anthropology. For our seaside midterm roadtrip this year we visited Canterbury, Margate, Dover Castle and the White Cliffs National Trust. In addition to all these adventures together, student explored the role of data in projects such as:
Summer 2024
We launched INFO 4747 in London, UK in the summer of 2024. There were eight amazing students in the inaugural class, with majors spanning information science, computer science, applied math, music, and art practices. For our seaside midterm roadtrip, we visited the Winchester Cathedral, Go Ape, Bournemouth, and Stonehenge. In addition to the many experiences we shared, small teams of students split off to explore the role of data in a facet of British culture that interested them. Some of the 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 third graders from lots of different 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 ;-)
Entrance to the Headmaster's Office, Warner Bros. Studio
Tower of London, London
Bridge at Hogwarts, Warner Bros. Studio Backlot
Shakespeare's Schoolroom, Stratford-upon-Avon
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