The Atlanta University Center Consortium — the umbrella organization of Morehouse, Spelman, Clark Atlanta University, and Morehouse School of Medicine — just launched a Data Science Initiative. To celebrate, I am giving away two books!
Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:
The AUCC Data Science Initiative brings together the collective talents and innovation of computer science professors from Morehouse College and other AUCC campuses into an academic program that will be the first of its kind for our students,” said David A. Thomas, president of Morehouse College. “Our campuses will soon produce hundreds of students annually who will be well-equipped to compete internationally for lucrative jobs in data science. This effort, thanks to UnitedHealth Group’s generous donation, is an example of the excellence that results when we come together as a community to address national issues such as the disparity among minorities working in STEM.
Announcement of the Atlanta University Center data science initiative at http://d4bl.org/conference.html
To commemorate and honor the founding of this initiative, I’ve set up two book giveaways at Amazon. The first book is W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. W.E.B. DuBois was a sociologist who taught at the Atlanta University Center. His visualizations of African American life in the early 20th century still set the standard for data visualization and this book is a collection of visualizations that he and his Atlanta University students produced for the 1900 Paris Exposition. If Atlanta University students were doing amazing data science 100 years ago without laptops, we can only guess what the future holds. Click this link to get your book.
The second book is Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life by Dr. Ruha Benjamin, a contemporary African American scholar at Princeton whose work addresses “the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine”. Click this link to get a copy of Captivating Technology.
There is only one copy per book available so the first person to click gets the book.
If you want to know more about the work being done by Black data scientists, you should check out the DATA FOR BLACK LIVES III conference.
I’ll close with one of the sessions from the first Data for Black Lives conference. Where are the Black (data) scientists? Definitely at the Atlanta University Center!
Charles write here 