Data Empire: How Information Built and Broke Civilizations
Wed 10AM-12PM 2.2059
Long before satellites and algorithms, humans were already counting, categorizing, and recording each other — and every act of counting has always been an act of power. This seminar reads Roopika Risam’s Data Empire as its spine, tracing an 11,000-year history of data from Ice Age tally marks to AI-driven surveillance states, and asks a deceptively simple question: who decides what gets counted, and who benefits? Each session pairs one phase of Risam’s history with a different disciplinary lens — anthropology, law, economics, computer science, media studies — to interrogate how recordkeeping has organized empires, justified conquest, valued human lives, and now trains the algorithms shaping our own. Students bring their own regional and disciplinary interests to bear on a genuinely global story, discovering that the politics of data are never just technical. No prior background in data science, computing, or quantitative methods is required.
Week 1 — 14 Oct — what counts as data, and why has counting always meant power?
Week 2 — 21 Oct — no session on campus // reading time
Week 3 — 28 Oct — data before writing: memory, tallying, and the deep prehistory of record-keeping
Week 4 — 4 Nov — accounting as the birth of bureaucracy: tokens, temples, and early states
Week 5 — 11 Nov — fixing meaning: how written form standardized law, religion, and language
Week 6 — 18 Nov — census and empire: counting people as an act of rule (Rome to late antiquity)
Week 7 — 25 Nov — no session on campus // reading time
Week 8 — 2Dec —who decides everything: religious and administrative authority over records, 300–1400 CE
Week 9 — 9 Dec — the age of conquest by ledger: navigation, trade, and the “world-taking” empires
Week 10 — 16 Dec — inventing precision: measurement, science, and the Enlightenment’s obsession with exactness
Week 11 — 6 Jan — no session on campus // reading time
Week 12 — 13 Jan — becoming a subject of calculation: industrialization, statistics, and the modern individual
Week 13 — 20 Jan — midwives to a machine: early computing and the mechanization of record-keeping
Week 14 — 27 Jan — predicting the future: Cold War data science and the rise of forecasting as power
Week 15 — 3 Feb — code as sovereign: platforms, AI, and who rules through data today
Week 16 — 10 Feb — the futures in our hands: open debate
If you study this course in the module Interdisciplinary Perspectives (MA ISME) and intend to take the examintion with connection to this course (instead of the methods course in the summer term), the first deadline for the written assignment of 3000 words will be 19 Feb, the second deadline will be 26 Feb. Propose a topic until 6 Jan (this is a mandatory step; if you don’t propose a topic, I assume you will not write your paper with me/this course). The paper will be graded, thus counts towards your final grade in ISME.
If you study this course as part of Histories and Societies OR Traditions of Texts (MA ISME): Suggest your final paper topic until 5 Jan; this is mandatory to take the examination of the module. Submit the paper of 5000 words as mark-down (!!!) via email (from your fu-berlin email address) until 12 Feb for the first deadline, or 26 Feb for the second deadline. The paper is graded, thus counts towards your final grade in ISME.
If you study this course as part of Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte (MA Arabistik): notify me until 5 Jan whether you want to take the oral examination with me. They would take place on 3 Feb at 12 PM and last for 20 minutes; it is designed as a scholarly discussion (it can be held in German). For the oral exam, you choose two topics from the course that you want to talk about and engage with (critically); you do not need to present them. I will choose a third topic that we will discuss briefly. I will not tell you the topic beforehand but if you engage with the materials and discussions during the course, you will have no issues in passing this exam. It is evaluated on a pass/fail basis, so it doesn’t count towards the final grade.