First-Year Colloquium Seminar: #BlackGirlMagic (2017)

Spelman College conducts an Interdisciplinary Big Questions Colloquia (IBQC) series to our first-year students. The IBQC series promotes the development of “free-thinking Black women”, such as to be free from dogma, orthodoxy, group think, clichés and stereotypes, to enter into a clash of ideas about race and gender, to violate assumptions. One of  the Spring 2017 IBQC seminars offered was "#BlackGirlMagic: Social and Technological Influences in Promoting Positive Digital Narratives on African-American Womanhood".

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This seminar exposed students to data science principles, content and themes of influence that exists in black twitter and social media through concepts such as twitter backfeed and data analysis on topics related to black girlhood and the popular hashtag #BlackGirlMagic. By exploring themes centered in positive black girlhood and womanhood, students can find value in cognitive social science research perspectives that may lend to future careers in fields of data science and analytics.