Data and Democracy

Data and Democracy

MDST 7559

Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan

We 2:00pm - 4:30pm

Wilson Hall 117

 

Information, we are told, is the lifeblood of democracy. If citizens have access to plenty of quality information about their conditions, their candidates, and themselves, they can make measured, deliberate decisions about their future. So why, at this moment of maximal information creation, access, and flow, does democracy teeter? 

 

This graduate seminar will examine this question and traverse phenomena such as search engines, government data, journalism, social media, and artificial intelligence. It will also ask fundamental questions about the nature and needs of a healthy democracy.

Students will be expected to respond to cold-called questions about the reading each week. This course will be conducted via the Socratic method. In addition, each student will lead a class meeting session with a short presentation on the week’s reading. Students will also submit five written assignments as part of a process to generate a research paper of publishable quality. The first will be a one-page prospectus that outlines the basic question the paper would answer (not graded). The second would be a draft of the first three sections of the paper: The abstract; the introduction; the review of literature, along with a two-page bibliography. The fourth would be a full first draft of the final paper. And the fifth would be the final paper. Each submitted assignment except for the prospectus will be 20 percent of the final grade. The remaining 20 percent will be participation, derived from regular class participation, one's ability to respond to questions, and the class session each student will run.

We will use Microsoft Teams and Zotero for collaborative work. You must add all of your sources to the master bibliography on Zotero.

 

PLEASE NOTE: THERE WILL BE NO CLASS MEETINGS THE SECOND WEEK OF THE SEMESTER, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 24 OR THE FIRST WEEK OF APRIL, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3. 

 

Required Reading and Viewing (Most available on Canvas under UVA BOOKSTORE INCLUSIVE ACCESS):

 

Brayne, Sarah. Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021.

 

Broussard, Meredith. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2018.

 

Coded Bias. New York, NY: Women Make Movies, 2020. https://www.codedbias.com/. ALSO AVAILABLE ON NETFLIX

 

Coeckelbergh, Mark. The Political Philosophy of AI: An Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022.

 

Marwick, Alice E. The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media. Yale University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300271652.

 

Papacharissi, Zizi. After Democracy: Imagining Our Political Future. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.

 

Powell, Alison B. Undoing Optimization: Civic Action in Smart Cities. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. 

http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6531310.

 

Risse, Mathias. Political Theory of the Digital Age: Where Artificial Intelligence Might Take Us. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009255189.

 

Simons, Josh. Algorithms for the People: Democracy in the Age of AI. Princeton University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691244914.

 

Sinnreich, Aram, and Jesse Gilbert. The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2024.
 Available in Files on Canvas.

 

Stroud, Scott R. “Connective Democracy: The Task Before Us.” Media Ethics Magazine. Accessed May 10, 2023. https://www.mediaethicsmagazine.com/index.php/browse-back-issues/216-spring-2021-vol-32-no-2/3999348-connective-democracy-the-task-before-us.

 

Torres, Émile. “Why Longtermism Is the World’s Most Dangerous Secular Credo.” Aeon, October 19, 2021. https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo.

 

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. New York  N.Y. ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

 

Woolley, Christian Staal Bruun Overgaard, Anthony Dudo , Matthew Lease , Gina M. Masullo , Natalie Jomini Stroud , Scott R. Stroud , Samuel C. “Building Connective Democracy: Interdisciplinary Solutions to the Problem of Polarisation.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism. Routledge, 2021.

 

Course Schedule 

Please have all the reading and all your questions and comments ready each week by class time.

 

Week 1 January 17 

Introduction 

No reading; Assign weeks for discussion leaders

 

Week 2 January 24

No class meeting

 

Week 3 January 31

Read Vaidhyanathan; watch Coded Bias

Discussion leader: Vaidhyanathan

 

Week 4 February 7 

Read Broussard

Discussion leader: Mack Brumbaugh

 

Week 5 February 14

Read Sinnreich

Discussion leader: Samantha Cynn

 

Week 6 February 21 

Read Coeckelbergh

Discussion leader: Tianyi Gao

 

Week 7 February 28

Read Simons

Discussion leader: Matthew Ichida-marsh

 

Week 8 Spring Break

 

Week 9 March 13

Read Risse; Torres

Discussion leader: Jiwon Park

One-page prospectus due.

 

Week 10 March 20

Read Marwick

Discussion leader: Kerry Ronayne

 

Week 11 March 27

Read Brayne

Discussion leader: Emilia Ruzicka

 

Week 12 April 3  

No class meeting

 

Week 13 April 10

NO CLASS MEETING THIS WEEK

Draft of the first three sections of the paper (The abstract; the introduction; the review of literature, along with a two-page bibliography) due.

 

Week 14 April 17

Read Papacharissi

Discussion leader: Jinhou Zheng

 

Week 15 April 24

Read Stroud; Wooley et. al.

Discussion leader: Vaidhyanathan

Complete Paper Draft Due

 

Final Paper Due May 8