Hack for California
How can civic data be leveraged and configured towards advancing equity throughout communities in California? What civic issues have been ignored by existing data practices, and why? In what ways might civic data be abused or misused to surveil communities or misrepresent problems facing Californians?
I lead a weekly hack night at the UC Davis DataLab for students, staff, alumni, and faculty. In collaboration with project partners, we work to explore public data and design creative data products that address issues around inequity in California and across the country.
Carceral Ecologies Proximity Analysis
In collaboration with Nick Shapiro (UCLA) and his Carceral Ecologies Lab, this Hack for California project examines the proximity of carceral facilities to sites of toxic pollution such as brownfields, superfund sites, TRI facilities, airports, and military bases.
General Plan Map
In collaboration with Catherine Brinkley (UC Davis) and her lab, this Hack for California project enables users to access and query the text of all California General Plans - the most comprehensive blueprint for future visioning of cities. Currently, there are no states that have such a public database for querying General Plans state-wide.
Data Ethnographies Lab Book
The Data Ethnographies Lab Book, originally designed in moving my STS 115: Data Sense and Exploration course online in Spring 2020, walk users through a research project contextualizing, exploring, and visualizing a publicly-accessible dataset. The Notebooks prompt users to examine the diverse cultural forces operating within and through a dataset through immersive, hands-on engagement with the data. Through a series of labs in which users are given instruction on how to quantitatively summarize the features in a dataset in the coding language R (often referred to as a descriptive data analysis), users can also practice researching and reflecting on the history of the dataset’s semantics and classification.
Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE)
For the past several years, in collaboration with Kim Fortun, Mike Fortun, Brian Callahan, Renato Gomes, Aalok Khandekar, Ali Kenner, Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, Alli Morgan, Angela Okune, James Adams, and Tim Schütz, I have played a lead role in designing digital humanities software that now supports several hundred international STS scholars and anthropologists in producing collaborative ethnographic scholarship. The Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE) is an open source software distribution designed to support multi-sited ethnographers in the archiving of ethnographic artifacts, collaborative hermeneutic data analysis, and experimental publishing. As the Lead Platform Architect for PECE, I have been responsible for designing the platform’s data models, workflows, and interfaces to embody feminist and post-structural theories of language and to align with research and best practice characterized in the digital humanities, information sciences, and software studies.
Example instances of PECE include Center for Ethnography, Disaster-STS-Network, STS Infrastructures, and The Asthma Files