Data, surveillance, or computing excursions in NYC?

July 13, 2018 10:30 AM

I am a professor of information science, and I am teaching a special topic first-year undergraduate seminar this fall called "Data Doubles and Digital Traces." Are there any good museums, plays, movie screenings, or events related to surveillance, privacy, data, computing, and/or the self in New York City or Philadelphia in September through November of 2018 where I can take my students?

Some brief background on the class topic: everyone has a data double, or a shadow self that can be "seen" or analyzed by aggregating and processing the data that we produce every day as we interact with the world. In the class, we'll examine and think critically about data doubles from the perspectives of information science and personal and social informatics. We'll be reading and discussing all sorts of great readings from sociology, information science, and science technology studies. I'm super excited to teach this course, and I have the option to take my class on a field trip. My original plans fell through. There will be up to 20 of us attending, and I have transportation funds. The class is held in central New Jersey but field trips in these freshman seminars are encouraged.

I had planned to take them to the MOMA to see the Dear Data project, which is part of their permanent collection, but it won't be on display. I attended the Tactical Tech's Glass Room popup a few years ago in the city and loved it, but it was a pop-up, so it's gone.

I have looked at most of the big museums and nothing being displayed really fits (the best match is probably the Museum of the Moving Image's Video in the Internet Age exhibit, but that closes September 2 and classes start Sept 4).

It's a pretty far-reaching class, so I'd rather see things that "might" fit than the "perfect" fit. Any places, exhibits, or that has to do with identity and technology, surveillance, big data/small data, computing... etc. would be welcome.

posted by k8lin to Education (5 answers total)

You might get some ideas from this book.
posted by caek at 10:40 AM on July 13, 2018

You could go look at 33 Thomas Street, a huge windowless concrete skyscraper which houses a bunch of important network and phone infrastructure along with NSA surveillance facilities. I'm sure they'd never let you in, though, so it probably wouldn't be a very fun field trip without something else to do in the city.
posted by vogon_poet at 1:27 PM on July 13, 2018

Here goes a "might fit" idea. You could take them to the Eastern State penitentiary in Philly to look at the panopticon. If you're going to be exploring the development of power and surveillance historically, politically, and socially at all, this could be a cool thing to do in the beginning of the semester -- you can walk around the building and understand an earlier technology of surveillance, and pretty viscerally get the experience of not-seeing from the cells, and the ways it was an explicit goal to get prisoners to internalize the gaze and discipline themselves. Foucault wrote about Eastern State in Discipline and Punish. I brought a college class there once for a different reason and it was awesome.
posted by velveeta underground at 3:47 PM on July 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

20 people might be too large a group to join the monthly 2600 event? Or maybe it’d work out? Definitely a lot of great people there interested in privacy/data/etc. Reach out to them for suggestions as well?

I also remember this exorcism that took place last year. Maybe some of the participants would have ideas?

Also, you could try reaching out to some of the Internet Exchanges located in the city and seeing if one would let the group in for a visit?

Finally, maybe try contacting NYC Mesh?

(I miss NY) :)
posted by vert canard at 4:12 PM on July 13, 2018

Tell Data & Society you'd be interested in having a group of your students come by and ask whether there are any upcoming events at their think tank that your group would be welcome to attend.

Keep checking Eyebeam's, Ethical Tech meetup, Postlight meetup, and NYU ITP's events page to see what they plan, and check the Platform Cooperativism events page to see whether they hold a November conference in NYC again.

There's a recurring open source design meetup the first Wednesday of every month.

Check the Recurse Center's Localhost event listings regularly to see whether their upcoming public tech talks are relevant to your class.

PyGotham is Oct. 5-6 and has some talks on the schedule relevant to your students.

Some of the EFF-allied organizations in your region may be good leads as well!
posted by brainwane at 10:00 AM on July 20, 2018 [2 favorites]