Digital and Computational Studies Blog

Bowdoin College - Brunswick, Maine

Weapons of Mass Destruction, Cathy O’Neil

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Digital & Computational Studies is all about intersections. It could be between genres, musical phenomena, political opinions, art, travel, dance, anything! Technology’s potential to revolutionize the way that we interact with these fields is ever growing, especially with the arrival of artificial intelligence and the increasingly efficient development of code. This lends itself to a multitude of possibilities for intertwinement between technology and any one of these fields. After all, we use data everyday to make important life decisions. It’s becoming increasingly relevant to investigate the ways in which we insert technology into our daily lives, so as to more clearly grasp its effects and potential drawbacks. 

Late October, acclaimed mathematician Cathy O’Neil spoke at Bowdoin College on exactly this, presenting on the destructive power of algorithms. O’Neil received her PhD from Harvard University, is the founder of O’Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing, and recently testified for a Senate Committee Hearing calling for restrictions to prevent online extremism. Broadly speaking, O’Neil’s lecture focussed on the connections between human life and algorithms: health-wise, socially, psychologically, and beyond. 

For the most part, people trust mathematics and data. It’s numbers. How could it be wrong? O’Neil argued that the perception of algorithms as objective is fundamentally misguided and occurs as a result of the hidden nature of algorithms and programming. O’Neil’s analysis of AI marketing explained that algorithms are laden with the opinion of its creator. She articulated numerous examples of how these algorithms are pervasive, hidden, and deeply ingrained in institutionalized structures: from standardized tests that evaluate teachers to predictive algorithms that shape policing in America. Since algorithms are complicated, hidden, and largely inaccessible to those of us without programming experience, the danger is that algorithms are blindly trusted. Despite this, O’Neil encourages us all to be skeptical and question the programs that shape the world around us. 

Below, Math and Economics major Lucas Sheridan shares his takeaways from the talk.

By Doevy Estimphile & Lilo Bean

What Blackouts Illuminate, Marcela Guerrero

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Just a week after the second anniversary of Hurricane Maria hitting Puerto, Marcela Guerrero, the assistant curator at the Whitney Museum, presented What Blackouts Illuminate in Kresge Auditorium to a crowd of sixty, including students, faculty and members from the Brunswick community.

What happens when an island loses power for 170 days? Guerrero began her talk with a video addressing the discrepancy of blackouts depending on the relative socioeconomic conditions of the community which is being hit with a blackout. She compared Hurricane Harvey in Texas, where power was restored after eleven days, to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, where after 170 days power was just beginning to return to pre-blackout levels. Without electricity, you can’t refrigerate your food. Without electricity, you can’t use electronic banking. Without electricity, you can’t preserve vital medicines that are temperature sensitive.

Using a variety of art pieces to highlight the detrimental effects of the blackout on the population, Guerrero brought in material crafted by Puerto Rican artists. Some notable artists include: Torres-Ferrer, Allora and Calzadilla. Their work is exhibited in Puerto Rico and throughout the United States, including the Whitney Museum, diversifying the gallery space by displaying art from a traditionally underrepresented population. Guerrero herself is Puerto Rican and is contributing to this paradigm shift in the art world through her profession.

marcella-gurerro-speaking-at-bowdoin
Marcela Guerrero

Guerrero also addressed the dynamic between art and resistance by speaking to the recent shift in the Puerto Rican government as a result of festive protests after leaked documents revealed that corruption contributed to the delayed return of power. During the blackout, Puerto Ricans effectively took governance into their own hands and became their own first response teams. At the same time, President Trump was accusing the Puerto Rican people of “asking for too much,” despite the status of Puerto Rico as a tax-paying territory subject to American aid. Puerto Ricans took to the streets at night with lights, dancing, yoga, motor cycles, and even scuba diving, ousting Governor Ricardo Rossello, who had been in power.

Despite the tragedy Hurricane Maria brought to Puerto Rico, they found unity in the struggle. In their perseverance, their hope became a beacon of light in the darkness.

DCS Coordinate Major and Minor Approved

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Bowdoin faculty voted to approve the promotion of DCS from an initiative to an academic department offering both a Coordinate Major and a Minor. This result is the culmination of ten years of discussions amongst the institution and DCS professors including: Eric Chown, Crystal Hall, Mohammad Irfan, and Fernando Nascimento.

DCS falls perfectly in line with the liberal arts education as it spans across multiple disciplines and employs new computational methodologies in order to prepare students change the world. They will be able to bring skills learned in DCS into their other areas of study, preparing them for deeper levels of discovery. They will be fluent in digital literacy spanning from coding to data analysis to design. Further, students will be able to critically examine the implications of technology in relation to society, and understand the ethical consequences of the technology which they develop in the classroom.

Required Courses for the Coordinate Major:
•At least one of the following:
     o     DCS 1100, Introduction to Digital and Computational Studies
     o     DCS 1200, Data Driven Societies
•At least one of the following:
     o     DCS 2350, Social and Economic Networks
     o     DCS 2500, Digital Text Analysis
     o     DCS 2335, Understanding Place: GIS and Remote Sensing
•DCS 2450, Technology and the Common Good
•A senior capstone course.
     o     This is a year-long culminating course providing an opportunity for a research project that combines the student’s coordinate major with DCS.

Beyond these five courses, students choose a concentration made up of three Digital and Computational Studies (DCS) courses of their choice. The concentration is an opportunity for students to more closely, and more naturally, pair their coursework in DCS with their chosen coordinate major.

Required Courses for the Minor:
• One of DCS 1100 or 1200
• Four other courses in DCS, at least three of which should be at the 2000-level or above

With this approval, Bowdoin will have the opportunity to lead the liberal arts into the future by integrating traditional thinking with the modern world. As DCS continues to evolve, it will respond to emerging challenges at the intersection of technology and society, with the intention to contribute to the Common Good.

Social Media, Film, Gender Identity in Final Project by Sophie Washington ’19

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In Spring 2019, Sophie Washington completed an Independent Study with Professor Erin Johnson (DCS and Visual Arts). Here is the final product:

This short film is a visual essay and research documentary exploring the ways that recent filmic media from the early to late 2000s produced in Hollywood and online media (social media, online games and chat rooms) has shaped a cultural understanding of media-induced femininity. These notions of femininity are internalized by young women growing up in the 2000s and reproduced via the 21st century modes of identity through online profiles and social media accounts. Digital identity in millennial and Gen Z young women is a result of mixing both technology and social media with iconic cult films from the past two decades. Young women are both cognizant of and shape their identity based on a perceived, shared identity that has seeped through layers of media culture specifically since the advent of online and social media, with Hollywood’s help during the golden age of the “chick flick.” Cultural and historical influence in Hollywood films of the 2000s created distinct ideas of femininity and a combined digital experience of early online games and chatrooms shows distinct ties to contemporary shared and mass online identity in millennial young women, seen again through another wave of Hollywood films about young women’s self-expression online.

Tariffs and Contextualized Data Science: Independent Study by Liz Schilling ’19

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In Spring 2019, Elizabeth Schilling completed an Independent Study titled “Chinese-American Trade 1970-2018.”

Her work builds on DCS 1200 “Data Driven Societies” and research in History and Economics. Liz had to digitize much of the early data related to trade between the two countries, and she examined the place of tariffs in economic shifts. She wrote a thorough data biography and analyzed the quantitative information from multiple perspectives. Here is a link to her site:
https://sites.google.com/view/lizschilling