Information, Society & Culture

We are living in the “Information Age,” an epoch in human history marked by the rapid rise of new digital technologies that have profoundly transformed lives, communities and societies across the globe. From artificial intelligence to virtual reality, access to data and computing on an unprecedented scale opens novel frontiers for research in the arts, humanities, social sciences and STEM alike. At the same time, understanding the potential as well as risks such technologies pose for society has never been more urgent.

The Information, Society & Culture theme welcomes Duke students and faculty from across disciplines whose research expands our understanding of information, broadly defined. For some students and faculty, this might mean developing innovative data science and computational methods to address pressing societal problems or working to better understand and develop state-of-the-art algorithms to illuminate and model the world around us. Others might employ qualitative or creative approaches to, for example, critically examine the environmental and political consequences of new data technologies, expose the impact on society of transformations in how we get our news, or look to history to illuminate how people respond to shifts in the production, preservation and sharing of knowledge. 

Whatever their questions, Information, Society & Culture teams engage in collaborative research and project-based learning to explore both the great opportunities and great challenges of an ever-changing world of information, past, present and future.