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Course
Challenging “data”: epistemologies and methodologies of critical data studies
3 ECTS
Date: 17-19 November 2025
Location: Campus Norrköping, Linköping University
Examination: In interdisciplinary and cross-program teams, students will be asked to solve a real-world data problem. The assignment will be graded on not only the solution provided, but also on the record produced by the team of their work together, detailing tradeoffs in the design, tensions between different epistemologies, and methodological challenges.
Course coordinator: Katherine Harrisson (TEMA), Miriah Meyer (MIT). Special session by Prof. Lauren Klein, Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the Departments of Quantitative Theory and Methods and English at Emory University.
Registration: Before June 13 2025
Course information
This course provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of critical data studies. Co-taught across the Departments of Thematic Studies and Media and Information Technology at Linköping University, this course starts from the question: what counts as “data”? During the first half of the course, we will explore how “common-sense” ideas of what counts as “data” are actually highly specific to particular disciplines and materialized through specific technical practices and applications. For students grounded in humanities and social sciences disciplines, the course will introduce them to the technical challenges involved in collecting, processing, and visualizing data. For students grounded in technical disciplines, the course aims to introduce them to the ethical questions of working with data.
In the second half of the course, these more theoretical discussions will be operationalized through i) an interactive session with Professor Lauren Klein based on her current work Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, (http://dataxdesign.io/, and ii) a practice-oriented session which will focus on how to develop interdisciplinary conversations and methods to support the final assignment. The course will comprise a mixture of lectures, seminars and hands-on teamwork sessions. Interdisciplinary and cross-program teamwork is expected, and the course is open to both WASP-HS and WASP students.
Sample Literature:
D’ignazio, C. and Klein, L.F., 2023. Data feminism. MIT press.
Gitelman, L. ed., 2013. Raw data is an oxymoron. MIT press
