Integrating Data Science Ethics Into an Undergraduate Major: A Case Study

Figures & data

Table 1 Summary of ethical modules described.

Section	Topic	Categories	Bloom
4.1	OkCupid	Data	Application
4.2	StitchFix	Algorithms	Application
4.3	Grey’s anatomy	Practices, data	Application
4.4	Copywriting music	Practices	Evaluation
4.5	Coding race	Practices, data	Synthesis
4.6	Weapons of math destruction	Practices, algorithms	Evaluation

NOTE: Categories correspond to those identified by Floridi and Taddeo. ‘Bloom’ refers to Bloom’s taxonomy.

Fig. 1 The SDS student group chose to staff a ‘data ethics’ booth at Data Science Day 2019.

Fig. 2 Student self-assessment of their ethical capabiliities, and the importance of data science ethics in their education, from an anonymous survey of 23 students. We note that nearly all respondents saw the inclusion of data science ethics as an important enhancement to their education, although they were less certain of their own capabilities in analyzing ethical concerns. Created using ggplot2 (Wickham et al. 2021) for R (R Core Team 2021).

Wickham, H., Chang, W., Henry, L., Pedersen, T. L., Takahashi, K., Wilke, C., Woo, K., Yutani, H., and Dunnington, D. (2021), “ggplot2: Create Elegant Data Visualisations Using the Grammar of Graphics,” R package version 3.3.5. Available at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ggplot2.

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R Core Team. (2021), R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing, Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available at https://www.R-project.org/.

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