Data & Culture Midterm

According to our discussions about George Orwell’s 1984, “defamiliarization” is a relevant concept from the literary critic Victor Shklovsky because

a) Orwell was an expert in literary criticism

b) 1984 is a dystopic science fiction novel

c) the concept speaks to the weakness of habitual engagement with the world around

us and how literary works can change that

d) b and c

e) none of the above

C

Journalist Ismail Muhammad’s satiric essay criticizes the ads for Meta AI because they

a) portray people as oblivious and enfeebled

b) are addictive and manipulative

c) are disrespectful of both women and Muslims

d) portray thermodynamics as a hoax

e) All of the above

A

According to the Student Guide to Critical AI literacies which of the following

statements is FALSE

a) “machine learning” entails a process of statistical pattern-finding in large data

sets through which models learn to “optimize” for useful predictions

b) Generative AI is much like AI in science fiction

c) Using a chatbot for simple information retrieval in lieu of using a conventional search engine (without synthetic features such as Google’s AI overviews) has been estimated to be at least ten times more energy intensive.

d) DESIGN JUSTICE LABS is a Rutgers web platform that publishes student-led research on generative A

B

What was the traditional web "social contract" via robots.txt?

Sites allowed crawlers to scrape content in exchange for search engines routing visitor traffic back to them.

Why does David Pierce argue this contract is breaking under AI?

AI companies scrape data to train models that answer queries directly, taking data without returning traffic or attribution.

What was Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the web and HTML?

An open, decentralized, global information space where all knowledge could be freely interlinked.

What is the core tension in HTML according to Sam Lavigne (Scrapism)?

HTML is structurally built to be scraped, clashing with artificial capitalist scarcities like copyright and paywalls.

What mechanisms enforce artificial scarcity against web crawlers?

Rate limits, CAPTCHAs, paywalls, geofencing, and required user accounts.

How do anti-scraping barriers affect power dynamics?

They reinforce informational monopolies and surveillance regimes by restricting open access.

How can users avoid AI-filtered search results?

Add -ai to Google searches or switch to alternative engines like DuckDuckGo or Kagi.

Why did the discourse shift from "data/big data" to "AI"?

The label "AI" obscures the underlying data extraction, surveillance, and human labor involved.

How does Sarah Ciston define "data"?

"Values assigned to any 'thing'" (e.g., text, movements, sensor inputs).

How does Jathan Sadowski define "data"?

A recorded abstraction of the world created and valorized by people through technology.

What critical question do Abebe and Kasy pose regarding ML prediction?

"Whose goals count?"—since predictive systems are built to optimize specific, non-neutral objectives.

What is Datafication?

The practices and relations through which the world is transformed into legible data.

What are Data Worlds?

The onto-epistemological conditions that generate and are shaped by data practices.

What is Quantitative Evaluation in ML?

Objective, reproducible measurement of performance using numerical metrics and statistical analysis.

What are key quantitative metrics?

Accuracy, precision, recall (sensitivity), F1 score, and mean squared error.

What is the difference between Precision and Recall?

Precision measures true positives out of all predicted positives; Recall measures true positives out of all actual positives.

What is Qualitative Evaluation in ML?

Subjective assessment focused on user experience, interpretability, and behavior in context.

What are key qualitative criteria?

User satisfaction, decision interpretability, and robustness in edge cases.

Why combine quantitative and qualitative evaluations?

Qualitative review spots nuanced failure modes and edge cases, which are then systematically tracked and measured quantitatively.

What is Oren Cass’s critique of Silicon Valley's ethos?

While Big Tech embraced Mark Zuckerberg’s directive to "move fast and break things," society itself ended up being the thing broken.

What does Cass argue should happen when reducing tech harm is not in a company's economic interest?

Lawmakers must intervene and establish regulatory barriers to redirect corporate incentives.

What is Data Positivism?

The belief that massive data scale transforms data into a unique epistemic substrate capable of replacing scientific theory and causal inquiry.

What did Chris Anderson claim in his 2008 Wired article about the "Petabyte Age"?

He heralded the "end of theory," claiming massive datasets and statistical correlation render traditional scientific hypotheses and causal inquiry obsolete ("correlation is enough").

What does the phrase the unreasonable effectiveness of data refer to?