Stories in the Data

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

When you see a graph representing the nationalities and genders of workers in the Gulf, what lies behind these numbers? Who are the people they represent, and what is gained and lost by looking at them collectively, as a source of data? As the historian Dan Bouk has written, “There are stories in the data–you just have to know how to read them.” This course will help you to develop the skills to engage data in interdisciplinary humanistic contexts by developing a critical approach to data gathering, interpretation, and visualization. We will consider core methodological questions such as What counts as data? and How does the context of a dataset’s creation pose practical, methodological, and ethical challenges for humanistic scholarship? We will also practice creating data sets from archival materials, conducting basic statistical analysis, crafting visualizations of data in support of humanities research, particularly for digital humanities projects. Following Bouk, we will consider our encounter with “data” as an encounter with “a complicated, multilayered cultural object, a deep, often tangled text. To help us make sense of that opening question, our data and sources will deal with global histories of labor migration–forced, free, and somewhere in between–stretching from the 18th century Atlantic World to contemporary Arabian littoral of the Gulf. By the end of the semester, you will be able to read stories from the data often used to represent processes of labor migration and you will be able to see data in the stories which workers who migrate tell about their experiences, lives, and aspirations.