The world is awash in data. How can we make sense of it all? Businesses, scientists, and academics of all backgrounds are increasingly relying on visualization to better understand and communicate about data. This course serves as an introduction to the theory and practice of data visualization. Students will learn the design principles common to effective visual displays of data and how to overcome the most prevalent mistakes made by practitioners. We will spend considerable time in the computer lab working to collect, analyze, and communicate about multiple datasets throughout the term.
Final project: From the beginning of the course the students are aware that an outcome of the course is a project that, if done well, can add value to their professional portfolio. The project is a small study on some popular topic of their own choosing that they can investigate with data they have scraped or downloaded from the Internet. They submit the project in two parts: First, each team must compose a document which demonstrates that they have made a plan for their project and are able to hypothesize about the outcomes. Second, after they have completed their project they must communicate the results in the popular format of a blog post.
Video games is a booming multi-billion dollar industry and with its flourishing independent gaming culture and public funds for game developers, Denmark is a unique place to study this subfield of computer science. This course - in conjunction with the lab component - is a practical and conceptual introduction to game design and development. The juxtaposition between theory and practice is a cornerstone of the course and you will have ample opportunities to try out concepts and theories. Individually or in small groups, you will design, develop and test a beta version of a 2D or 3D game.
The course is also set up so that you have a chance to immerse yourself in the Danish gaming community. Together, we will explore the gaming trends in Copenhagen and venture to Germany, home to Gamescom, the world’s largest gaming convention. The main platform will be Unity, a Danish produced cross-platform game editor and engine widely in use by many companies in the industry.
In the lab component of the Game Development course, you will put into practice the theories and concepts you have discussed in the seminar section of the course. The semester begins with a crash course in Unity, an intuitive game development environment produced in Denmark that allows you to immediately tinker with a simple, existing game template and move on to develop simple 2D or 3D game designs of your own making. Simulating the Danish indie game community, which is characterized by small teams of 1-3 people rather than major game production conglomerates, you will work individually or in small groups throughout the semester. The games will be created using existing freely available game assets (graphics and sounds).
Wikipedia is one of the most important and highly accessed information repositories on the web. When we see that an event or person has an article about them on Wikipedia, they are conferred with a kind of legitimacy; in some sense, coverage on Wikipedia represents that this is a topic of collective interest that people have bothered to write about. However, the answers to questions like "what topics are worth writing Wikipedia articles about?" are not stable, and can change over time. They might reflect what Wikipedia editors care about and are paying attention to, as well as changing norms within the Wikipedia community and in society as a whole.
One particular mechanism that transforms our ideas of which topics are notable are prominent social movements. Many social movements work precisely to shape our collective notions of what issues are considered important, and seek to demonstrate that their grievances are legitimate. For example, when the Black Lives Matter movement gained steam, they sought to draw attention to instances of police officers shooting unarmed black people. The rise of this movement not only affected the extent to which police shootings were covered by news media, but also how they were covered on Wikipedia (Twyman et. al. 2017).
Since coverage on Wikipedia can be seen as a reflection of a topic’s legitimacy and influence, analyzing how a particular social movement shapes contributions to the encyclopedia can tell us a lot about whether and how that movement changes the way we collectively document ideas and events connected to their cause. It can also shed light on how editing activity on Wikipedia is shaped by current events. In this project, you will analyze how Wikipedia editing activity was affected by a social movement of your choosing by building and analyzing a large dataset of revisions made to articles connected to the movement, and tracking how editing activity on those articles changed over the course of the movement’s prominence.