Schedule

1 Entry points: self-tracking, self knowledge, self control, self transformation, quantified self, human augmentation, datafication, data humanism, data doubles, digital humanities, digital detox, "right to be forgotten," data brokerage

Introduction to Course Infrastructure

Discussion:

-Do people nowadays exercise more or less self-control compared to other times?

-What are some ways you track yourself? What are some ways you are tracked?

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2 Materials: The Quantified Self (5 mins); Quantified Self | Maarten ten Braber (20 mins) ; Quantified Self: Your digital self-help mentor (3 mins)

Readings: Why People Self Track Track ; The Personal Analytics of My Life; Rettberg “Quantified Selves” in Seeing Ourselves Through Technology

Quantified Self: A Global Phenomenon? Check out the traces of QS around the world. How do they differ? Where has the movement appeared? where does the movement seem to have persisted? London, Beirut, Dubai, Toronto, Portland, Paris, Geneva, San Francisco, Munich, Budapest, India. Can you find any groups in the places you have lived in the world who are interested in self-tracking, or alternatively who are advocates for digital privacy or digital citizenship? Is QS a thing of the past? What are the translations into the languages of the world?

Discussion: What does it mean to measure the self? Is there a difference between quantification, measurement and datafication? How does measurement of our selves and our bodies serve different purposes? Who is doing it? What insights do proponents of quantification claim to gain? What might it mean to “see ourselves through technology”? Can self-quantification serve the individual good? The public good? Do certain identity positions find more expression in this conversation? What kinds of citizenship might be needed if quantification becomes a form of monitoring and profiling? What digital traces do you leave in the world? What do you think Rettberg is getting at by "what we cannot measure"?

Need some help downloading an ebook? Check out this video.

Sign up for your ungraded, short presentation (in pairs) here.

3 Cultures of quantification. Students in the course will work in pairs and choose one of the topics below (other topics are possible, but should be pre-approved by the instructor). In a short presentation of about 5 minutes, please discuss its relation to the quantification of human life. What is the position of the subject vis-a-vis the quantification? To what extent do you feel quantification serves as optimization, violence or even control? Is the quantification involved voluntary? Does the quantification serve a higher good? Can we opt out from it? If there is data produced, what happened to it? Is it attached to certain identities?

In addition to the topics raised in previous classes, here are some other potential topics for our short presentations: Bodybuilding; Keto meters; psychometrics & IQ tests; eugenics; phrenology; carbon footprint; food miles; actuarial science; competitive sport quantification; quantified baby; GPS receivers, pedometer, biofeedback; LinkedIn; mood rings; genetic testing; Google analytics; smart appliances; standardized tests; class assessment breakdowns; GPA; Google Sensorvault; algorithmic choreography ; air pollution wearables; smart toothbrush; digital ingestion tracking; smart contact lenses; quantified student.

Watch: Quantified Life (Ajana); Quantified Self to the Extreme

You might link your presentation to some of the issues raised in this medical article “The Rise of Consumer Health Wearables“.

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4 Parables of (Self-)Quantification

Watch: Dear Data embedded videos

Read: Benjamin Franklin, chapter 9 of Autobiography (excerpt in drive) full download here; Daniel Defoe, beginning of A Journal of a Plague Year (excerpt in drive) full download here; The Data Visualizations of W.E.B. Dubois

Discussion: Can we say that these thinkers were producing data? What words do they use to describe that process? To what extent are the statistics they discuss represented in graphical form or in prose language? or both? How do their data describe, abstract or objectify human beings? Are there higher spiritual or social justice goals in mind?

Brainstorming for Assignment 1: Each student should begin to think of ways that they will record some aspect of their lives every day and begin keeping a journal, digital or analog. This data collection exercise will begin next week and last until midterm.

Watch in class: Bruises

5 Hands-on: Learning Google Sites & Your Own Dear Data (in Sheets)

Return: The Data Visualizations of W.E.B. Dubois

As a part of our enterprise Workspace account, we can set up Sites with relative ease. Your work for this class will all be done within such a Site. Once you create a Site, please register your name and the site here. Your instructor will demonstrate how to create a site in class.

Read: “Data Organization in Spreadsheets” ; "What Makes a Good Self-Tracking Exercise" pp 93-104 in Making Sense of Data (Neff/Nafus, in drive); Getting Started with Sites.
Watch: Using Google Sheets Tutorial (Ammagui) ; Data Not Found
Hints: Tracking your workouts | Ask Me Every | Awesome QS | How to Track Your Habits

What are your main takeaways to organizing data? to self-tracking in the form of a spreadsheet? what scales will you use? at what pace will you track? will you use a device? What balance of quantitative and qualitative data will you strive for? How consistent do you think you will be? Will your tracking be better than a sensor?

6 Sensors, Selves and Privacy

Read: What is a Smartphone Sensor? ; “Your Smartphones are Filled with Trackers” ; Trackography; “How to Restrict the Amount of Data Apps Collect about You” (Nield)
Browse: Furberg’s Self-Generated Fitbit Dataset (Zenodo) ; A Guide to Smartphone Sensors (NASA--advanced!); Smartphone Sensors for Health Monitoring and Diagnosis (Majumder & JamalDeen)
Watch: Activate a Powerful New Hidden Feature on your Android

Check out what some of the smartphone sensors are? Can you imagine ways to track something that you do everyday? What do you know about the privacy settings of your devices? How can you limit the amount of data that "leaks" out of them? When you change the settings of your device, is the usability of that device impacted?

RESPONSE ONE (follow the link for the response prompt)

7 Quantification, Tracking and Privacy

Watch: Surveillance Culture (28 mins)
Read: Ottawa's Use of Location Data (National Post); Tools (EEF); GDPR ;
Listen: Location Privacy and Data Ethics (Mapscaping, 30 mins)
Browse: See your geosocial footprint on Twitter or that of someone else. See the NYT’s highly interesting Privacy Project and choose one topic to talk about; QR Codes May Bring Up More Than a Menu; QR Codes, Privacy and Security
Demo: The instructor will demo Privacy Badger in Firefox.

What do you think of the idea of choosing where your data goes, like when we choose what bank or investment company? What do you think about the expanded definition of surveillance in the video? What do you think of device use and data as a "barter"?

Want to know more? Check out FemTechNet’s suggestions for Locking Down Your Digital Identity. Need a digital detox? Want a social media reboot? (Social Dilemma)

8 Data Clinic for Assignment 1

Reminder: create a Site, please register your name and the site here.

Quick discussion of privacy fixes from last class.

Ways of visualizing: Google Sheets "Chart" types | rawgraphs.io | other suggestions? 2022 datavis tools

In preparation for today's data clinic, please share a copy of the spreadsheet you have begun to collect your data in the shared drive folder "QS shareable datasets." If you have other documents (screenshots, other non-tabular formats), include them in a folder with your name. Please make sure that your datasets are ok to be shared with a number of people and do not contain traceable markers you are not comfortable sharing. The same goes for other people who may be included in your data.

ASSIGNMENT ONE

9 Google Takeout

Prepare: Go to your Google Account and request a “takeout” of a selection some of your data. You are provided with many options. Make sure that you do this well in advance of class–it can take some time. Take a look at it before class. You do not need to share it with anyone. We will examine locational information in class as well as file formats and discuss what we find.

Discussion: What are the formats for Google takeout data (CSV, JSON, HTML)? How has Google “cooked” some of your data captured by sensors or trackers? If you could export this 6 times a year over the next year, what difference do you think it would help you get a deeper picture of your usage?

10 Visualizing Google Takeout

umap.openstreetmap.de | rawgraphs.io | Charts

RStudio Cloud Notebook: "Saved Places to Leaflet"

11 The Panopticon

Read: Panopticon (Wikipedia); Foucault, Discipline and Punish (excerpt in Drive); Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control (excerpt in Drive); Royal Panopticon of Science and Art (Wikipedia); Sousveillance (Wikipedia)

Examine: Plan of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison (Wikipedia) - be sure to check out the animation!

Questions: What are the various meanings of the word "panopticon"? Why do you think that Bentham's has prevailed over, say, the other meanings of the panopticon in the Royal Panopticon of Science and Art?

12 Surveillance Capitalism

Read: Zuboff "Big Other", & Stalder "The 'Known Unknowables' of Quantification and the Paranoid Self"

Watch: Morozov "All Watched Over By Algorithms" (13 min)

RESPONSE TWO

Workshop on "Deep Listening" with Sam Green (optional) - sign up here

13 Data Feminism / Deep Listening / Data Empathy

Read: Why Data Science Needs Feminism? from Data Feminism (D'Ignazio/Klein) and ch. 3 "On Rational, Scientific, Objective..." ; "Use Data Empathy to Become a Better Data Scientist" (Nikulski); Stevens and Wernimont, “Seeing 21st Century Data Bleed Through 15th c. Wound Man”

Explore: British Library Sound Archive

Discussion: What links can you find between data feminism and deep listening? What is the relationship between the individual and the collective in deep listening? Can we imagine forms of empathy with data (see this chapters of this forthcoming book)?

Required Performance: 9 March, 8pm "32 Sounds" (96 hour PCR required for this performance--please plan accordingly) You will need to book your own ticket using the promo code you get from your instructor.

14 Guest speaker: Live discussion with Sam Green about 32 Sounds

15 Learning Survey 123 (with Taylor Hixson)

Watch: Creating your First Survey in Survey123

Download for your Phone: Survey123 for Android | iOS

Design (in class): a project for sound tracking on Campus, balancing deep listening and "actionable" data collection

Collect (weekend): Download the Survey123 app. Once you have signed in with your credentials for ArcGIS, click on "download surveys" and search for "Listening with campus." Over the weekend, collect 5 data points using Survey123 and come to class on Tuesday 29 March with ideas for what is missing in our "data model." Pay attention to the process of collecting the data and your decision making / description process. What is missing that you would like to be able to capture? What issues from data feminism, data empathy, data privacy, etc do we need to incorporate?

This week your instructor is away at a conference. Class will be held remotely.

16 Downloading your History from an App / Platform

Request a download from an app or a platform you participate in. Some suggestions can be found in the Guidelines for Assignment 2.

In class we will download the Survey123 dataset to see what it looks like and attempt to visualize it. We will also discuss the Assignment 2.

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17 Guest Speaker: Nancy Gleason - On Tracking in the Workplace

Prepare: Make a list of a few key concepts of the course so far for our discussion of workplace tracking. These key concepts will be used in a mind mapping exercise in zoom discussion. You can also reuse this material for your final response 4.

Read: Eight Effective Ways of Tracking Employee Work (Forbes); "Show Your Work" (D'Ignazio and Klein); "Can Workplace Tracking Ever Empower?" (Møller et al)

ASSIGNMENT TWO

18 Contrary to previous announcements, this class will take place on at the usual time on the 5th.

Digital Afterlives (TW: this session contains mentions of death and grieving)

Read: Google Auto-Delete; "The Digital Afterlife Industry is there to help you plan your death" (RestofWorld); "Powerful Mexicans Pay to Scrub their Reputations Online" (RestofWorld); "Remove All Your Personal Data from the Internet"

Skim: "Are the Dead Taking over Facebook?" (Ohman and Watson)

Watch: "What Happens to Your Data After You Die?" (MSN)

Questions: What are ways societies have traditionally memorialized people? If you could, would you create a chat bot of a deceased person? What do you think of tracking memories (or dreams, think of the character Chase on "Inventing Anna")? What would cultures you are familiar with think of Graziano's idea of uploading and "engineering consciousness"? How are privilege and digital afterlives interdependent?

19 Discussion of Data Not Found

In preparation for today's course, please watch the performance of Data Not Found linked above (97 mins). Kaki was featured in this NYUAD Arts Center documentary as well as the video of Bruises we watched earlier in the semester.

If you like watching Q&A's from after a show, you can watch this one your instructor lead. You can also learn about the show here.

RESPONSE THREE (Optional)

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21 Learning ArcGIS online

Watch: An old-ish video (12 mins) for how to use ArcGIS Online (AGOL). This video shows you how you can upload data to AGOL.

Watch: ArcGIS StoryMaps: Getting Started with the New Story Builder (39 mins) - optional

You will use AGOL to visualize the spatial data of the collective dataset for the final assignment. You do not have to make a storymap.

Collect: Data points for sound map (10 points) using Survey123

22 Data Clinic for A2

23 Internet of Things

Watch: Enchanted Objects TedX (15 mins) | A Day Made of Glass (5 mins) (optional 11 min making of video)

Skim : Jørgensen, “The Internet of Things,” A New Companion to Digital Humanities (in Drive, first 6 pages)

Listen: The Spatial Internet of Things (Mapscaping) (30 mins)

Listen: Function (The Digital Human) (29 mins)

RESPONSE FOUR | FINAL ASSIGNMENT

24 Digital Citizenship in a Quantified World

Read: Resisting Quantification (in shared drive) from Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society (Hintz et al)

25 Workshopping Sound Dataset