Handbook

Note: The course code for this course was previously ARTS1092

Understanding how data is sourced, shaped, and used is crucial to working in media today. Data and its rhetoric are all around us. How we imagine and understand data has profound impacts on how the world is organised: how resources are distributed, how information is derived and communicated, how we understand recent events, how value is produced, and how we are subject to policing and surveillance. In this course you will learn to make and analyse data and data objects. You will be introduced to key theories across a range of disciplines – media studies, critical data studies, journalism, critical race theory, gender and cultural studies – that will help you to historicise, understand, situate, and interpret data. But you will also get hands on with data, experimenting with data processes, and learning how to collect, extract, analyse, and render data sets. This will give you the tools to evaluate the data that is used by the media, governments, corporations, activists, and artists to understand and organise the world around us. By the end of the course, you will have built a foundational understanding of the processes involved in working with data and an ability to reflect on current debates about the impact of data on society.