Welcome to the Website!
There is wide agreement that ethical considerations are a valuable aspect of a data science curriculum, and to that end, many data science programs offer courses in data science ethics. There are not always, however, explicit connections between data science ethics and the centuries-old work on ethics within the discipline of philosophy. Here, we present a framework for bringing together key data science practices with ethical topics. The ethical topics were collated from sixteen data science ethics courses with public-facing syllabi and reading lists. We encourage individuals who are teaching data science ethics to engage with the philosophical literature and its connection to current data science practices, which is rife with potentially morally charged decision points.
This website is associated with the paper: Colando, S., & Hardin, J. (2024). Philosophy within Data Science Ethics Courses. Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, 32(4), 361–373. https://doi.org/10.1080/26939169.2024.2394542. The paper gives a more in-depth overview of the connections between ethics topics and current data science practices and is now available in the journal.
Data Science Ethics Course Syllabi
The table below details the syllabi that we used to examine data science ethics curriculum. A majority of them are undergraduate courses and include a reading list on the syllabi. Visit the data science ethics syllabi page for in-depth notes on each course’s learning goals and topics.
We thank the Pomona College SURP program and Kenneth Cooke Summer Research Fellowship for supporting SC in summer research.