Data in Society, Minor College of Letters & Science

The Data in Society minor provides students with skills to work with and think critically about data in a variety of academic, administrative, and industrial domains. Courses in the minor teach students to use computational methods (primarily in R) to explore, manipulate, analyze, and visualize numeric and textual data with a critical awareness of the provenance of the data, the choices made in data collection, the questions that can and cannot be answered with any given data set, and the implications of all of these issues for analytic outcomes. Students learn how to communicate about data in written, oral, and visual media with data scientists and with diverse sets of stakeholders. The minor is sponsored by the Department of Science & Technology Studies.

Minor Advisor

101 Young Hall; 530-752-5104. To contact a minor advisor, email stsadvising@ucdavis.edu, schedule an academic advising appointment, or join Drop-In Advising (no appointment needed).

Faculty Advisor

The current Chair of STS (Professor Colin Milburn) is also available for advising by appointment.

Required Courses16
Data & Society
Visualizing Society with Data
Data Sense & Exploration: Critical Storytelling with Analysis
Research in Data Studies
Elective Courses4
Choose one or seek the approval of the program advisor for an unlisted course that focuses on a topic related to Data in Society.
Methods in Science, Technology, & Medicine Studies
Visualization in Science: A Critical Introduction
Computing, Data, & Law in the United States
The Global Information Age
Sounding Data: Critical Approaches to Sonification
Internship
Total Units20