Misinformation, Networks, and Politics: From Plato to Now

In October 2018, Twitter released nine million tweets believed to be from the Russian Internet Research Agency, tweets that often aimed to influence European and American political and social life. But this is not a new phenomenon! Since Plato banned poets from his ideal Republic, philosophers and politicians have argued about the effects of propaganda in political and social life.

This course invites you to put political uses of “fake news” as propaganda in historical context—from Plato to the invention of the printing press to Twitter—and to learn how to use network visualizations to track how information bubbles can thrive. The computational approach will teach you—from the ground up—how to explore and track the role of interpersonal connections in the spread of misinformation and propaganda.

We will explore which problems are distinctly new and which can be fruitfully analyzed as modern versions of age-old philosophical and ethical questions. Questions central to the course include:

• How does information spread in a community and to what effect?

• How does technology (understood broadly, from the invention of writing to radio to the Web) change social and political communities?

• What sources of information do we trust and how do we select them?

• And, finally, what is the difference between information, data, and knowledge?

We will start the semester by focusing on a historical survey of key approaches to these concerns: from Plato’s critique of writing as a corrupting technology in The Phaedrus, to the spread of print culture in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Encyclopedic project of the Enlightnement, to questions around the uses of news (and “news”) in political and social life.

Greed, Vanity, and Laughter: Renaissance Theater and the Urban Vices

Renaissance London was crowded, expensive, and in the middle of a commercial and social revolution; it was a city where gallants, rising merchants, refugees from continental wars, and greedy criminals uneasily shared the same urban landscape. This course uses traditional literary methodologies alongside some computational tools to study how Tudor and Stuart playwrights, such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton, used satire, comedy, and even tragedy to criticize city-life.

The computational approach will teach you—from the ground up—how to explore and track how these innovative writers reshaped and redeployed classical rhetorical texts (from Aristotle to Horace to Quintilian) to better understand their times. We will study how elements and characters common to these plays—the perpetual busybody, the “city-vices,” and the focus on the urban landscape itself—were used by different authors to construct moral vocabularies to criticize real-life problems. We will pair this computational approach with interpretive techniques central to literary studies, learning about the history of Tudor and Stuart England, the development of commercial English theaters, and the bewildering, but fascinating landscape of Renaissance London and its literature.

No mathematical prerequisites and no prior familiarity with Renaissance literature necessary.

Required Books:

• Ben Jonson, The Alchemist and Other Plays

• Dekker, Chapman, Marston, Jonson, and Middleton, The Roaring Girl and Other City Comedies

• Margalit and Rabinoff, Interactive Linear Algebra

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Sample Assignment: LDA and Sentiment Analysis

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Thinkers, Discoverers, and Problem Solvers

Part of the FOCUS program.

Renaissance mathematicians theorized the probability of winning games of chance, fought duels over the solution of algebraic equations, and discovered imaginary numbers. Their discoveries, in turn, sparked the imagination of other scientists, artists, travelers, as well as of political theorists and writers—but does measuring and quantifying the world spark or suppress the imagination? Is mathematical discovery essential for a sense of wonder at the universe or does it destroy the poetry of the unknown? And how different is science from magic and alchemy?

Taking up these questions, this class explores how Renaissance men and women interpreted the new discoveries in algebra, geometry, and probability. We will begin by reading, in translation, some of the original mathematical works that broke new ground in these fields and learn how to work with pre-modern mathematical conventions. The main concern of the course will be with how these discoveries influenced thinkers as different as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Margaret Cavendish as they wrote about politics, religion, and literature.

 Required Books:

• Shakespeare, Othello

• Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

• Girolamo Cardano: The Book on Games of Chance

• Columbus, The Four Voyages

• Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

Selections from the following are available on course management website:

• Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems;

• John Milton, Paradise Lost;

• John Falconer, Cryptomensys patefact

• Charles I’s letter of April 4th 1646.

Idealistic Nature: The Literature, Philosophy, and Cognition of Ecology

Course Description:

We are dependent on our environment for survival. But what is “the environment” and what is “nature”? Humans—as well as termites and elephants—live in a world that is both given to us and shaped by their own interventions. In this course, we will explore the history that shapes our modern understanding of the natural world. From Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the documentary Planet Earth, representations of the world around us influence the way we understand our relationship to nature—is nature a world animated by gods and spirits? Or a delicately evolved system on the brink of destruction? The course will investigate how changing views of nature are deeply implicated in our social and ethical, as well as ecological, relationships. We will consider the debate over the start of the anthropocene—that is, when does human activity begin to substantially affect our planet?—within the context of the long intellectual history of Western conceptions of the relationship of “man” and “nature.”

This course will be organized along three major units:

1. Enchanted cosmos: the class will begin by exploring the deep roots of Western understandings of nature and the universe. Starting with Plato and ending with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, we will read literary and philosophical works that present “pre-scientific” representations of nature. Along the way, we will explore how developments in the visual arts helped to shape how people oriented themselves in the natural world.

2. Humans, nature, and the new sciences: breaking with earlier accounts of the cosmos, the scientific discoveries of the 16th to 18th centuries accompanied a whole new way of thinking about man’s place in nature. In this unit, we will trace how new notions of human self-mastery developed hand-in-hand with a new mechanistic understanding of nature and “the universe.”

3. Pristine nature: in this final unit, we will consider how modern understandings of the environment arose in response to the over-exploitation of our natural resources. We will investigate how the separation of “mankind” from the natural world ushered a new exploitative view of human labor as well as of natural resources. Focusing on the representations of nature from the Romantic period to the creation of the U.S. National Parks to the astonishing popularity of nature documentaries such as Planet Earth, we will ask how we developed conceptions of “untouched” nature—separate from and yet endangered by human activity.

Term project for this course will take the form of a group project using StoryMap JS. During the last month of the term, we will bring our readings together and work towards building a mapping project that rethinks the boundaries of a threatened ecological area in terms of competing histories, narratives, and cultural claims.

Persuasion: Voices in Dialogue

Course Description:

In the Platonic dialogue Gorgias, Socrates’ antagonist, the teacher of rhetoric Gorgias, argues that speaking persuasively is the greatest of all goods: it’s the art of making people do your will. Shrewd political thinkers and speakers know that the ability to persuade and manipulate their audiences is central to social life. But for Socrates, Gorgias’ rhetoric is the greatest of all evils: it’s a method of non-rational manipulation of the mob. Both of these accounts of persuasive speech unfold in a written dialogue that aims to teach us how to live well in a complex political world. This course will trace the legacy of this ambivalent view of dialogue, persuasion, and speech. We will explore how the dialogue transformed from a genre of philosophical instruction to a supple literary device by studying works that represent the relationship between persuasion, philosophical education, and political life. From Plato’s Socratic dialogues to Jane Austen’s Persuasion to the TV show Deadwood, written dialogues reflect on the power of spoken words to develop a communal form of reasoning; characters learn—or disastrously fail to learn—through speaking.

We will explore how plays, formal philosophical dialogues, novels, and even collections of poems engage and adapt the form of the spoken dialogue from classical antiquity to the early nineteenth-century, with particular emphasis on the early modern period (1500-1700). We will reflect at length on how the conventions of character, direct and indirect discourse, plot, and narrative are imagined and reinvented in a variety of literary forms

One person, one vote—Political representation from Aristotle to the 2016 Presidential Election

Course Description:

What does it mean for a government to justly represent its people? What do we mean by “one person, one vote”? In the 2016 Evenwel v. Abbott case, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the long-standing principle that each person (including children, felons, and non-citizens) rather than each voter should be counted in apportioning political representation. In writing for the majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg appealed to “history, precedent, and practice” to argue that the appellants “have shown no reason for the Court to disturb this longstanding use of total population.” This course explores the “history, precedent, and practice” of political representation alongside its ethical, political, and mathematical contexts. The course will start by investigating the long (and surprising) history of conceptions of political representation in the West. We will explore how the meaning and importance of the term “representation” changed from the direct democracies of Greek city states to Medieval notions of corporate life to contemporary political theories in order to better understand the relationship between representation and consent. Alongside works of political theory, we will study imagined conceptions of political participation in plays, novels, and film.

As part of the course, we will study, analyze, and re-enact crucial sections of a remarkable document: the contemporary notes of the Putney Debates (1647). In it, we will see a “live” argument of universal, male suffrage taking place during the English Civil Wars.

In 2018, the course also included a Data Expedition. A Data Expedition is a two week exercise carried out in class in collaboration with a graduate student. It’s purpose is to introduce the undergraduate students to data analysis and visualization methods.

Readings:

Aristotle, Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (Penguin).

Shakespeare, Coriolanus, (Folger Shakespeare Library).

Machiavelli, The Prince (Oxford).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Penguin).

David Hume, Essays (Liberty Fund): http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hume-essays-moral-political-literary-lf-ed

Sir William Clarke, Puritanism and Liberty, being the Army Debates. You can print a free digital version of this volume: http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hume-essays-moral-political-literary-lf-ed

Taking Risks and Measuring Up: The Literature of Chance and Fortune

Spring 2020

We all take measured risks—but how do we know if it’s rational to do so? How do we measure  successful risk-taking? These questions can be highly personal—what career should I choose?—or reflect global concerns—what interventions will mitigate the effects of climate change? In this course, we will consider how attitudes towards risk-taking and success have changed over time: from early fears that luck, fortuna, was a capricious goddess who could not be understood, to the Enlightenment hopes that the mastering of mathematical probability would give us the tools to solve most human problems. Through attentive readings of literary, philosophical, and scientific texts, we will explore the links between the literature, ethics, and the mathematics of measuring every aspect of human life in our attempts to change the odds in our favor.

Endeavour (1768)

This course will include a digital project focusing on the three primary voyages of Captain James Cook (1726-1779), whose exploration of the Hawaiian Islands, New Zealand, and Australia put coastlines of the South Pacific on European maps for the first time. Cook also wrote an extensive and detailed journal on these voyages that discuss, among other things, the risky and evaluative nature of engaging with foreign plants, animals, and indigenous populations. These accounts are publicly available and collected in a single volume, and thus will be easy for students to access. They are also available in digital format. We will use this digital version, which contains the travel journals of James Cook, Joseph Banks, and Sydney Parkinson on the ship Endeavour during 1768-1771, to create three concurrent datasets detailing the voyage.

First, prior to working with the datasets, the class will spend a week at the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library to work with the following texts:

Aa, Pieter van der. Le nouveau théâtre du monde. Leiden, 1713. 

Moll, Herman. The Compleat geographer. London, 1723

Moll, Herman Atlas minor: or a new and curious set of sixty-two maps London, 1736

Atlas  [Nuremberg] : [Homann Erben], [1756] 

Dury, Andrew. A New General and Universal Atlas. London, 1761

Zatta, Antonio. Atlante Novissimo... Venice, 1775

Cook, James. A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean. London, 1784.

Second, students will read selected excerpts from Cook’s accounts in order to trace a geographic narrative of the decisions undertaken during the voyage. Students will then map Cook’s movements using ArcGIS, tracing the stops made on his three voyages using in order to understand the challenges, risks, and assessments that went into such a voyage. Students will then compare the map they created with 18th century cartographic innovations that attempted to account for the newly discovered lands. Alongside their visualization, students will present their findings in a final project to the class.

Cook’s map of New Zealand

The driving questions of this exercise center on the notion of “discovery” by Europeans of new world: where did Cook stop, and why? How long did he stay in each new place, what was his objective in the “discovery” of each new location, and what factors contributed to his evaluation of a successful voyage?  We will also ask students to consider how geographical, naturalist, and—most contentiously—ethnographical representations of the Southern Hemisphere and its peoples changed Cook’s and his readers’ perception of what it means to be human in an expanding world.

This exercise was developed in consultation with Rachel Gevlin.

Dangerous Beliefs and Seductive Images: the Literature of Religious Violence in the “Secular” West

Course Description:

Can religion be held responsible for violence? How do images—both visual and literary—spark our imagination? These two seemingly disparate questions have become more closely connected in the wake of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack and the subsequent debates over freedom of expression. The opening of the twenty-first century has witnessed terrible violence perpetrated by self-declared religious-political movements, from ISIS in Iraq and Syria to the extremist branches of the Hindu nationalist movement in India. Responding to these conflicts, we have come to think of the threat of religious violence as a particularly contemporary problem, a problem that stems from a clash of cultures: peaceful modern secularism against violent primitive fanaticism. This clash is often represented as threatening modern freedoms as well as human lives—where liberal societies build museums and foster a free press, religious extremism targets concerts and destroys ancient artifacts. Historians and sociologists of religion, however, have recently started to challenge this view. They argue that modern western states were born from the tumults of early modern religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. In this class we will explore how the concept of nation-state that developed in the Renaissance is deeply implicated with our current war on terror. We will ask: how are religious beliefs used to justify acts of violence and what are the origins of the separation of state and religion that characterize the secular west? Alongside this question, we will explore how artistic expressions—from paintings to poetry and from sculptures to tragedies—have come to be seen as important weapons in ideological and cultural fights.

Syrian Refugee Crisis, Photojournalism, and Social Media (Tutorial)

Description:

This is a research-project-centered tutorial that will build on a Summer 2017 Data+ project (http://bigdata.duke.edu/projects/visualizing-suffering-tracking-photojournalism-and-syrian-refugee-crisis). Students must receive permission to enroll in the course and they are required to work as part of a team towards building a term project.

Constructing their own research questions, students will analyze how photographic images of the Syrian Refugee Crisis distributed via media outlets, how local as well as national news outlets report on the Crisis, and how narrative is shaped by visual media.

A potential area of focus is how photojournalistic images are altered, repurposed, and reinterpreted through social media. Ultimately, the participating students will be required to develop their own research questions as part of a team. Group work and project management are an integral part of the course. This tutorial will help students think through questions surrounding the links between visual and textual interpretation, copyrights problems, and ethics. The data analysis component of the project will ask students to learn how to use image search software and construct a visualization of their results.

Democracy, Games, and Persuasion (English and Mathematics)

Course Description:

What is a fair election? What kinds of elections favor centrist, consensus building candidates, from a game theoretic point of view? What is the best way for a politician to persuade while still being truthful?

Democracy, Game Theory, and Persuasion explores these questions from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. In this class, Dr. Bray uses game theory to discuss the meaning of democracy. The course examines the pros and cons of different approaches to voting, such as preferential ballot elections and Ranked Pairs Voting, and introduces game theory as an essential tool for predicting political behavior. At the same time, Dr. Giugni will introduce the class to the central literature and theories of political persuasion in the face of disagreement. We will focus on which rhetorical strategies have been embraced or viewed with suspicion by theorists, from Plato to Hobbes, as well as adopted in imaginative literature, from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to Walter Miller’s sci-fi classic A Canticle for Leibowitz. This course will ask you to think carefully about the practical and theoretical preconditions for life in a democracy.

The course also included a Data Expedition:

A Data Expedition is a two week exercise carried out in class in collaboration with a graduate student. It’s purpose is to introduce the undergraduate students to data analysis and visualization methods.

Information, Media, and Politics: How New is the New Media?

Fall 2019 and Fall 2020

Course Description:

Just before the 2016 presidential election, Wired Magazine claimed that “the role of big data + social data in influencing election decisions cannot be ignored.” In October 2018, Twitter released nine million tweets believed to be from the Russian Internet Research Agency, tweets that often aimed to influence European and American political and social life. The magnitude and ubiquity of “big data” and “social media” is clearly a new phenomenon—but is this novelty just a matter of the size of the problem or does it present a qualitatively different question?

This course invites you to put the new media revolution in historical context. We will explore which problems are distinctly new and which can be fruitfully analyzed as modern versions of age-old philosophical and ethical questions. Questions central to the course include:

• How does information spread in a community and to what effect?

• How does technology (understood broadly, from the invention of writing to radio to the Web) change social and political communities?

• What sources of information do we trust and how do we select them?

• And, finally, what is the difference between information, data, and knowledge?

The first part of the semester will center on a historical survey of key approaches to these concerns and their influence in our contemporary debates. We will start with Plato’s critique of writing as a corrupting technology in The Phaedrus and parts of the Republic. We will then consider Renaissance conceptions of the vices and virtues of communication. This first part of the course will culminate in an introductory examination of the first attempt at “information science,” the Encyclopedia and its philosophical foundations, and how it set the stage for our contemporary accounts of the role of information in public life.

In the final unit of the course, students will build on this theoretical background to design and execute a term project focused on a contemporary event, question, or problem. This project will require both a digital component (such as a visualization or a mapping project) as well as a traditional research paper component.