2020-21 Academic Catalog

Data visualization and activism have a common goal: to make the invisible more visible. This seminar will focus on the strengths and limitations of graphs and other charts to illuminate and convince. We will examine landmark visualizations that have changed history, starting with W.E.B. Du Bois's famous "data portraits", which debuted at the 1900 Paris World's Fair to tell a complex story of agency, sophistication, and oppression of African Americans in post-emancipation America. As we discuss the role of data viz in activism, we will learn to create our own visual arguments. No previous experience with statistics or graphing software is necessary.

In this seminar, we will use games (both by studying them and by playing them) as a lens through which we can explore all manner of fascinating questions. How do the games we play shape our culture and our communities?  What makes a game fun, engaging, addictive, boring, brutal, or banal? How can games encourage certain kinds of behavior, even after we've stopped playing them?  Could we make Carleton itself a bit better--or at least more fun--if we gamified certain aspects of life here? To aid our exploration, we’ll draw on readings from multiple genres and employ a variety of research methods to analyze games from social, textual, and design perspectives. This course will also include weekly lab sessions on Wednesday evenings (6:15-8:30PM).  Students will be required to attend at least eight out of ten lab sessions.

This interdisciplinary course addresses one of the signal features of contemporary academic, professional, public, and personal life: a reliance on information and arguments involving numbers. We will examine how numbers are used and misused in verbal, statistical, and graphical form in discussions of world events, health, science, and social issues.

This course will explore how scientists communicate with other scientists as well as the general public. Focused on the types of communication expected in the sciences, assignments will include reading, writing, and speaking activities tailored to a variety of audiences. We will explore current scientific topics in the news and investigate whether results are well supported by evidence and seem quantifiably reasonable. Students will use data, graphics, and text for a variety of purposes and will incorporate their assignments into several class-produced journals. Prerequisite: Requires concurrent registration in IDSC 198