Data & Society Minor - University of Houston
Skip to main content

The Honors College

Data & Society Minor

Data & Society Minor

Data science is changing the world and this minor — open to all UH students — helps our students engage in that transformation. We begin with the fact that the tools that have driven the new approaches to data all started in practical applications. The data science revolution isn't led by an elite group of believers but by a groundswell of pragmatic approaches emerging together to create a new way of looking at the world. The minor allows students to combine courses from majors around campus, and our expanding list of partnerships provide research and community engagement opportunities that tie the whole picture together. 

Society is not a single thing — it's all the ways we communicate with each other and all the ways we convince each other to work together on shared projects. Understanding how data can be used to make an argument, how a representation is convincing or not, how a decision is well-grounded or not, all go back to the pragmatic elements of collecting, analyzing, visualizing, and representing data. The partnership with the Community Health Workers Initiative and its network of researchers and frontline health workers makes the pragmatic data problems in public health available to our students for projects in class and beyond. Other partnerships include educational and ecological data projects, and each student is encouraged to find a place where they are inspired to engage with the problems themselves.

Courses & Requirements

A minor in Data and Society requires 15 hours of approved coursework. Students must complete two core courses (HON 3350H, HON 4350H) and 9 hours of coursework from a list of approved electives. Petitions for approval of coursework not listed below that can be applied to the minor will be made to the director of the Data & Society minor and the Dean of the Honors College.

  • Core Courses:

    Students are required to take these two courses to complete a Data & Society minor. The courses can be take in either order or concurrently.

    HON 3350H: Principles of Data and Society
    This is the introductory course for the minor and is structured around student-led discussions of course readings that examine the historical foundations, philosophical underpinnings, and social forces that shape the role data plays in our society. The goal is to get students to engage with data science principles and techniques as seen through a humanities lens while taking the first steps towards developing their own long-term data projects. The course is organized in a series of sprints with thematically linked readings and assignments. The major assignment for the course is a multi-stage project in which teams of students first identify strands of research related to social determinants of health and then select individual topics within a selected strand to perform a deep dive into how the topic impacts health and well-being within Houston.

    HON 4350H: Data and Society in Practice
    Building on principles introduced in HON 3350, this course grounds our humanities approach within the history and development of data science as students design a semester long project to use publicly available data to explore local social and public policy issues. The course is structured to provide students with multiple opportunities to present their project and receive feedback from peers and the course instructor. Students submit regular written reports as the work to develop a project prospectus that would be suitable for submission to an undergraduate research scholarship program.

  • Approved Electives:

    CIS 4320: Decision Informatics
    COMM 4372: Media, Power, and Society
    ECON 3368: Economics of Health Care
    HON 3397H: various topics (check with instructor)
    HON 4355H: Engaged Data (Honors Colloquia)
    POLS 3312: Arguments, Data, and Politics
    POLS 3316: Statistics for Political Scientists

  • Petitioned Electives:

    Students may request that courses not listed as approved electives be counted towards a Data and Society minor degree. These courses must be approved by the Data & Society faculty and submitted as petitions through the Honors College advising office. To initiate a request, please email Andrew Kapral (ajkapral@uh.edu) and include a copy of the course sylabus.

    The most commonly requested/approved courses are on topics related to data analysis or research methodologies. Below is a partial list of courses previously approved for inclusion in Data & Socitety degree plans:

    COSC 3337 - Data Science I
    COSC 4337 - Data Science II
    ECON 3320 - Introduction to Economic Data Analysis
    MATH 4322 - Introduction to Data Science and Machine Learning
    MATH 4323 - Data Science and Statistical Learning
    MATH 4339 - Multivariate Statistics
    BZAN 4397 - Selected Topics in Business Analytics

  • Other Requirements:

    Students must complete at least 12 hours in residence, nine hours of which must be at the advanced level. A maximum of six hours of approved transfer credits may be accepted toward the minor upon the approval of the program director. No more than six hours of a student's major may be applied towards the minor. Students must earn a 3.0 GPA or higher in all coursework counted toward the minor.

  • Join the Mailing List:

RELATED LINKS