DA 245 - Introduction to Cultural Analytics

Here you will find information on required readings, import university policies, and course-specific policies like attendance and cell phone use.

Required Texts

Computers and Software

Our Teaching Assistant

Our teaching assistant this semester is Raina (Chengjun) Zhang. Raina is a senior and a double major in data analytics and computer science, with a minor in math. She is fascinated with NLP, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. Her first internship was in a mobile game company in China. During the internship, she used K-means and RFM models to analyze users' in-game behavior data. In addition, she also tried to classify mobile games on the App Store by genres based on Latent Semantic Analysis. Raina's office hours will be 5 to 6 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the Data Analytics Lab (BMRG 405). (If you want to meet up with Raina this week or next, email her to arrange a location.)

Grade Breakdown

Late Work

The pace of this class is fast, especially in the first five weeks of the semester when we are focusing on core profiencies. If you have a legitimate emergency such as a serious illness, a mental health emergency, or a death in the family, I will grant an appropriate extension with a new due date. The trade off is that work turned in this way is probably not going end up in my hand when I grade everything else, so it’s going to get less feedback. If you miss a deadline entirely without getting an extension, you will automatically lose 10 points off the top of your grade for each day it is late, in addition to any points you lose for the quality of the work.

Distractions

Cell phones should be off and put away. Laptops are okay for notes and such, but you should not be messaging, using Facebook, etc. I’ll check screens regularly give you a verbal warning on your first offense. After that, I reserve the right to ask you to leave class and mark you absent if you are creating a distraction.

Being Prepared for Class

Coming to class prepared means that you have the day's reading in hand (printed or digital) and have come to class with a way to take notes (printed or digital). If you are not prepared for class, I reserve the right to grade as if you were absent for that day. Anything due on a given day is due at the start of class. Any digital submission of material is due by the time class starts on the day the hard copy is due. If students so not come to class prepared, I reserve the right to add reading quizzes to the day's work. I very much prefer not to do exercise this option and am asking you to help make it unnecessary.

Academic Integrity

Proposed and developed by Denison students, passed unanimously by DCGA and Denison’s faculty, the Code of Academic Integrity requires that instructors notify the Associate Provost of cases of academic dishonesty. Cases are typically heard by the Academic Integrity Board, which determines whether a violation has occurred, and, if so, its severity and the sanctions. In some circumstances the case may be handled through an Administrative Resolution Procedure. Further, the code makes students responsible for promoting a culture of integrity on campus and acting in instances in which integrity is violated.

Academic honesty, the cornerstone of teaching and learning, lays the foundation for lifelong integrity. Academic dishonesty is intellectual theft. It includes, but is not limited to, providing or receiving assistance in a manner not authorized by the instructor in the creation of work to be submitted for evaluation. This standard applies to all work ranging from daily homework assignments to major exams. Students must clearly cite any sources consulted--not merely for quoted phrases, but also for ideas and information that are not common knowledge. Neither ignorance nor carelessness is an acceptable defense incases of plagiarism. It is the student’s responsibility to follow the appropriate format for citations. Students should ask their instructors for assistance in determining what sorts of materials and assistance are appropriate for assignments and for guidance in citing such materials clearly.

Our Commitment to Liberal Arts Education

Denison's mission statement articulates an explicit commitment to liberal arts education. It emphasizes active learning, which defines students as active participants in the leaning process, not passive recipients. Denison seeks to foster self-determination and to demonstrate the transformative power of education. A crucial aspect of this approach is what Denison's mission statement refers to as "a concern for the whole person," which is why the university provides a "living-learning environment" based on individual needs and an overriding concern for community. This community is based on "a firm belief in human dignity and compassion unlimited by cultural, racial, sexual, religious or economic barriers, and directed toward an engagement with the central issues of our time."

In this class, we will discuss inequality directly. In many cases, you will asked to apply quantitative reasoning skills to these subject, which can be difficult because there is always the potential for the available data to complicate or contradict something you may feel very passionate about. In these cases, you should aspire to adopt an attitude of critical skepticism, i.e. wary of claims that are not supported by evidence but potentially willing to be persuaded by evidence if you find it compelling, and willing to give that evidence a fair hearing.

How we treat one another will be a cornerstone of these conversations. Denison's "Guiding Principles" speak of "a community in which individuals respect one another and their environment." Further, "each member of the community possesses a full range of rights and responsibilities. Foremost among these is a commitment to treat each other and the environment with mutual respect, tolerance, and civility." It's easy to treat someone this way when you like them and agree with their ideas, but the real challenge is treating those who differ from us with the same compassion and respect. However, I consider disruptive, deceitful, or hateful behavior to be breaches of these responsibilities. Bullying, trolling, hate speech, and harassment of any kind will not be tolerated.

Individual and Team-Based Coding Challenges

Week-to-week coding challenges designed to be completed individually or in teams, depending on the difficult level. Eight projects in total, 4 points each. Designed to help students develop competencies required for success in the class. Work will be assessed on quality of your solution, the elegance of your code, and the level of critical thinking demonstrated in written materials.

Authorship Attribution Project

The first of two team-based projects. In this assignment, your team will asked to assess whether a novel written with multiple narrators can be successfully identified as work belonging to its actual author when a machine learning model is trained on the true, as well as a distractor set of three alternative authorship candidates. Training and test data for this assignment will be provided by the professor, but your team will need to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to prepare the data for analysis.

Sound Project

The second of two team-based projects. In this assignment, your team will asked to train a model to detect different types of well known, regional English accents. Audio data for this assignment will be provided by the professor, but your team may need provide data labels, partition the data into a training and test set, and design your computation so that the overall strength of your model can be assessed.

Individual Research Project

An individual assignment in which you will be expected to articulate a research question related to the subject of cultural analytics, design a computational approach to your question, identify and/or develop a dataset for your analysis, execute a computation, and write a paper that describes your work using the IMRAD template (Introduction, Methods, Results, Analysis, and Discussion). Includes several smaller assignments with due dates throughout the semester, the purpose of which is to ensure the success of your project.