Recent ucla_information_studies items

Collecting evidence of counter-narrative: the unspoken labor of archiving justice & recovering the material wages owed

Wed, 3 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Contemporary information workers in the United States, especially community-based archivists, have been collectors, stewards, and preservationists of counternarratives against justice-serving institutions that systematically disbelieve, and distrust historically marginalized groups. While many information professionals refer to these counternarrative projects as passion projects, and, or activism, I argue that by doing so, information professionals do a disservice to both themselves, and the populations they aim to serve. Instead, I apply theoretical frameworks of immaterial labor and emotional labor, to re-analyze scholarly literature of community-based archives, and other professional counternarrative work in order to reveal the labor involved in these justice-oriented projects. I do this re-interpretation of our work to construct an argument that by asserting ourselves as counternarrative professionals, we become experts, and therefore witnesses to injustice. This ability to...

Archiving for Extinction

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Anjali Arondekar, Wendy H. K. Chun, Verne Harris, N. Katherine Hayles, Shannon Mattern, Saidiya Hartman, and Kate Eichhorn, among other scholars of the archives, have questioned the presumption of the archive as complete, whole, legitimate, authoritative, and ultimately in any way “total,” by looking beyond the contents that the physical repository hosts and guards, as well as how, what, and who goes under-, mis- and altogether unrepresented. In their tradition, we find that the contemporary moment provides exemplars of where an archival (re)making is being uncritically taken up, increasingly envisioned, and subsequently reliant upon present-day technological capacities and the technological imaginaries of the future near and far. Under the guise of scientifically vetted global betterment, and drawing on a long legacy of publicly funded innovation that is then recaptured and taken up by private industry, Big Tech takes profit and credit for these particular future-oriented deployments,...

The Software at Our Doorsteps

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Software at Our Doorsteps

From Data Creator to Data Reuser: Distance Matters

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

From Data Creator to Data Reuser: Distance Matters

New models of privacy for the university

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

New models of privacy for the university

Data Governance Task Force: Final report and recommendations

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Data Governance Task Force: Final report and recommendations

The coyote in the cloud

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Coyotes (Canis latrans) exist throughout North America and increasingly thrive in dense urban spaces; they also cause controversies when they eat small pets or seem to pose a threat. Based on fieldwork in Los Angeles, and an archive of over 400 conversations collected from the online application Nextdoor (2015–2019), we theorize the emergence of what we call the cloud coyote. Cloud coyotes are not representations but lively actors in coyote politics animated by discussion, debate, and a settler logic of property relations in places like Los Angeles. They do this by performing a threat and justifying a response that includes various attempts at extermination, containment, and assimilation, all of which—even supposedly humane alternatives—further sediment forms of settler colonialism in urban Los Angeles. We diagnose this process, show how it works, and argue that anticolonial practices—in both Los Angeles and its cloudy territories like Nextdoor—are needed to escape from perpetuating...

Knowledge Infrastructures: The Invisible Foundation of Research Data (Slides and Video)

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Knowledge Infrastructures: The Invisible Foundation of Research Data (Slides and Video)

Why It Takes a Village to Manage and Share Data

Fri, 6 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Why It Takes a Village to Manage and Share Data

Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Early Childhood Obesity: Growth Trajectories in Body Mass Index

Tue, 2 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

ObjectiveThe aims of this study are to describe growth trajectories in the body mass index (BMI) among the major racial and ethnic groups of US children and to identify predictors of children’s BMI trajectories.MethodsThe Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) was used to identify predictors of BMI growth trajectories, including child characteristics, maternal attributes, home practices related to diet and social behaviors, and family sociodemographic factors. Growth models, spanning 48 to 72 months of age, were estimated with hierarchical linear modeling via STATA/Xtmixed methods.ResultsApproximately one-third of 4-year-old females and males were overweight and/or obese. African-American and Latino children displayed higher predicted mean BMI scores and differing mean BMI trajectories, compared with White children, adjusting for time-independent and time-dependent predictors. Several factors were significantly associated with lower mean BMI trajectories,...

Trends in Child Protection and Out-of-Home Care

Thu, 6 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

BACKGROUND: Over the past decades, increased knowledge about childhood abuse and trauma have prompted changes in child welfare policy, and practice that may have affected the out-of-home (OOH) care population. However, little is known about recent national trends in child maltreatment, OOH placement, or characteristics of children in OOH care. The objective of this study was to examine trends in child maltreatment and characteristics of children in OOH care. METHODS: We analyzed 2 federal administrative databases to identify and characterize US children who were maltreated (National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System) or in OOH care (Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System). We assessed trends between 2000 and 2010. RESULTS: The number of suspected maltreatment cases increased 17% from 2000 to 2010, yet the number of substantiated cases decreased 7% and the number of children in OOH care decreased 25%. Despite the decrease in OOH placements, we found a 19% increase...

Library Services and Incarceration: Recognizing Barriers, Strengthening Access

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Library Services and Incarceration: Recognizing Barriers, Strengthening Access

Meaningful Data Metrics for Whom?

Thu, 9 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Make Data Count (MDC) is a scholarly change initiative, made up of researchers and open infrastructure experts, building and advocating for evidence-based open data metrics. Throughout MDC’s tenure, various areas key to the development of research data assessment metrics have been identified. Please join a Spring seminar and discussion series centered around priority work areas, adjacent initiatives to learn from, and steps that can be taken immediately to drive diverse research communities towards assessment and reward for open data.The third and last webinar in our series “BEGIN: metadata for meaningful metrics” will look at next steps to develop responsible and fair data metrics that can reflect the use and impact of research datasets and help elevate them to first-class scholarly outputs. We’ll focus on necessary metadata to construct metrics that take into account characteristics and contexts of open data across disciplines.

"Meaningful Data Metrics for Whom?" is the...

Research Data Infrastructure: A Problem of Governance

Thu, 9 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

5a sesión del Seminario de Estudios sobre el Futuro. Con la participación de Christine Borgman, Directora del Center fo Knowledge Infrastructures de la Universidad de California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Supply Chain

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Scholars from a range of disciplines interrogate terms relevant to critical studies of big data, from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability. This groundbreaking work offers an interdisciplinary perspective on big data and the archives they accrue, interrogating key terms. Scholars from a range of disciplines analyze concepts relevant to critical studies of big data, arranged glossary style—from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability. They not only challenge conventional usage of such familiar terms as prediction and objectivity but also introduce such unfamiliar ones as overfitting and copynorm. The contributors include a broad range of leading and agenda-setting scholars, including as N. Katherine Hayles, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Johanna Drucker, Lisa Gitelman, Safiya Noble, Sarah T. Roberts and Nicole Starosielski. Uncertainty is inherent to archival practices; the archive as a site of knowledge is fraught with...

Supply Chain Management

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Supply Chain Management

“Come Correct or Don’t Come at All:” Building More Equitable Relationships Between Archival Studies Scholars and Community Archives

Thu, 2 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This collaboratively authored white paper reports on a May 2021 two-day online workshop about the current state of academic research on community archives, its impact on communities represented and served by such organizations, and ways to envision and enact more equitable relationships moving forward. Participants included community-based archivists, advocates for community archives, academic researchers, and students. This white paper reports on key themes that emerged from this two-day workshop, and presents collaboratively-derived principles and protocols for building ethical, more equitable partnerships between academic researchers and community-based archivists in the future. Our findings surface several damaging tendencies in academic research, including: parachuting in, knowledge extraction, financial inequity, and transactional consent. We then identify nine key principles for building mutually beneficial relationships between academic researchers and community archivists:...

Breakpoints and Black Boxes: Information in Global Supply Chains

Thu, 4 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Supply chain management (SCM) deals with the procurement and assembly of goods, from raw material to the consumer. With the growing prevalence of offshore manufacturing and suppliers' reliance on "just-in-time" inventory management, SCM has become both astoundingly complex and critical to companies' competitiveness. This essay examines how data works in global supply chains, focusing on SAP SCM, the huge but hard-to-access SCM software with the greatest market share. It argues that SCM is characterized by two countervailing tendencies: the demand for perfect information about goods and movement, and the need to erect strategic barriers to the fullest knowledge about supply chains. Counterintuitively, this selective obscurantism is what makes supply chains so fast and efficient.

Vietnamese American Anticommunism

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, Vietnamese Americans have utilized their refugee status as a form of political and cultural thread stitching together a sense of identity and community out of displacement and loss. Among those classified as anti-Communist ethnic minorities by social scientists, Vietnamese in the United States are often compared to Cuban Americans who have been able to collectively align with the Republican Party to leverage representation and power in mainstream politics. With South Vietnam’s collapse and the exodus of Vietnamese refugees from the homeland after the Communist takeover, overseas communities that formed in the wake of the war have been staunchly anti-Communist and vigilantly opposed to the new unified Vietnam under a socialist regime. Given the outcome of the Vietnam War, anticommunism has been the dominant community politics for Vietnamese Americans. This political ideology has often erupted in violence and controversy in the last three...

Tết

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The lunar new year is arguably the most important holiday for Vietnamese, whether in the homeland or overseas. Known as Tê´ t Nguyên Dán, or simply Tê´ t for short, the holiday can be divided into three periods: Tê´ t Niên (before New Year’s Eve), Giao Thù’a (New Year’s Eve), and Tân Niên (the New Year). The customs and traditions associated with Tê´ t have changed for Vietnamese Americans, as with other cultural forms that have endured international migration.

Vietnamese Refugee/Immigration

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Vietnamese immigration to the United States is a relatively recent occurrence when considered within the scope of Asian immigration. Vietnamese immigration to the United States occurred in the latter half of the 20th century and continues steadily today. A vast majority of Vietnamese Americans arrived as refugees, thus their departure from Vietnam was marked with political turbulence, and their arrival in America was highly scrutinized in the news media and academic scholarship. Before 1975, Vietnamese living in the United States were students, professionals, and war brides. In the 1950s, their numbers were in the low hundreds. However, in the 1960s until 1974, the population of Vietnamese Americans swelled to about 15,000. It was during those war years that the small population of Vietnamese Americans participated in the antiwar movement in American colleges and universities. This group remains an understudied population in Vietnamese American history.

Little Saigon and Vietnamese American Communities

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Vietnamese American communities and their commercial and cultural enclaves have developed all over the United States since the early 1980s. Vietnamese Americans are now the fourth-largest Asian American group in the country (after immigrants from China, India, and the Philippines in order of size). According to the 2007 Survey of Business Owners report, the percentage of Vietnamese Americans who own businesses has increased by 56 percent since 2002, compared to the 40 percent increase of other Asian groups. The oldest and largest of these enclaves is Little Saigon in suburban Orange County, California. Situated in a historically white community lined with orange groves in Southern California, Little Saigon has helped bolster the region’s economy with tourism and business. According to 2010 Census figures, the Vietnamese American population in Southern California is 271,000, by far the largest concentration outside of Vietnam. Little Saigon sprawls out from the city of Westminster...

Review: Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America by Karin Aguilar-San Juan

Tue, 7 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In this first comprehensive study of Vietnamese American place-making and community-building, Karin Aguilar-San Juan bridges the sociology of immigration and place with critical race studies in her Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America. Based on research conducted between 1994 and 2005 in Boston, Massachusetts and Orange County, California, Little Saigons suggests that the process of ethnic place-making in these distinct urban and suburban sites, respectively, reflects a conscious effort by Vietnamese Americans to “stay Vietnamese” in a “multicultural” American society. Yet, rather than embrace an essentialist view of cultural identities as fixed and unchanging, Aguilar-San Juan underscores how the terms and parameters for being Vietnamese in diaspora are being negotiated through the mutually constitutive processes of place-making and communitybuilding. Ethnic places both cushion American ethnics from the violence of racialization while marking them as outsiders to the...

The Metamorphosis of Vietgone: Vietnam to Arkansas to New York to Orange County

Tue, 7 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

South Coast Repertory’s world premiere of Vietgone by playwright Qui Nguyen is a highly anticipated event for us, as we’ve had the unique experience of watching this play’s metamorphosis since its inception. Qui, who hails from Brooklyn, NY, originally had tossed around the idea of writing a script about Vietnamese gangsters in Little Saigon. However, during his residency in the summer of 2013, SCR staff invited the three of us to meet with Qui and share the work we were doing in the local Vietnamese community.

The Cultural Work of Anticommunism in the San Diego Vietnamese American Community

Tue, 7 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Cultural Work of Anticommunism in the San Diego Vietnamese American Community

Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora. By Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde.

Tue, 7 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora. By Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde.

The Impact of Paid Internships at Community Archives for MLIS Students: A White Paper Reporting on the UCLA Community Archives Lab/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Paid Internship Program

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This white paper reports on the impact of paid internships for MLIS students at community archives.

Big Data, Little Data, or No Data? Scholarship, Stewardship, and Humanities Research

Wed, 19 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

While the humanities have caught the “big data” wave, “little data” remains the norm in those many domains where evidence is scarce and labor-intensive to acquire. Until recently, data was considered part of the process of scholarship, essential but largely invisible. In the “big data” era, data have become valuable products to be captured, shared, reused, and stewarded for the long term. They also have become contentious intellectual property to be protected, especially in the humanities. Public policy leans toward open access to research data, but rarely provides the public investment necessary to sustain access. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. As the number and variety of research partners expands, so do the difficulties of sharing, reusing, and sustaining access to data. Until the larger questions of knowledge infrastructures and stewardship are addressed by research communities, “no data” may become...

Big Data, Little Data, or No Data? A Social Science Perspective on Data Science [Presentation slides]

Wed, 19 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One person’s signal is another’s noise. Data exist in the eye of the beholder; they are neither products nor commodities. This talk is based on two decades of studying how scientists collect, make, manage, use, reuse, and lose their data. Scientific communities have built large knowledge infrastructures that encompass observatories, telescopes, sensor networks, data archives, technical standards, software tools, institutions, and scholarly societies. These infrastructures evolve over long periods of time; no one is really in charge. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. Many of the essential practices necessary for knowledge and data production are invisible, resulting in fragile infrastructures that are difficult to maintain. The ability to share, reuse, and sustain access to scientific data depends on these fragile systems and relationships. Data scientists tend to focus on “big data,” whereas “little data,”...

On the Legitimacy of Knowledge Infrastructures