Recent ucla_information_studies_oapdeposits 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

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...

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

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.

Two modes of participation: A conceptual analysis of 102 cases of Internet and social media participation from 2005–2015

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

Two modes of participation: A conceptual analysis of 102 cases of Internet and social media participation from 2005–2015

Feeling Liberatory Memory Work On the Archival Uses of Joy and Anger

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Feeling Liberatory Memory Work On the Archival Uses of Joy and Anger

Elites tecnológicas, meritocracia e mitos pós raciais no Vale do Silício

Wed, 2 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Elites tecnológicas, meritocracia e mitos pós raciais no Vale do Silício

Keynote: Big Data, Little Data, or No Data? Why Human Interaction with Data is a Hard Problem (slides)

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Enthusiasm for big data is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data in scholarship and the challenges of human interaction and retrieval. 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. Information retrieval is hindered by the lack of agreement on what are “data.” Complexities of human interaction with data will be illustrated with empirical examples from environmental sciences, sensor networks, astronomy, biomedicine, and other fields. Unless larger questions of knowledge infrastructures and stewardship are addressed by research communities, “no data” often becomes the norm. Implications for policy and practice in the information sciences will be explored, drawing upon the presenter’s book, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (MIT Press, 2015), and...

What lies beneath?: Knowledge infrastructures in the subseafloor biosphere and beyond

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We present preliminary findings from a three-year research project comprised of longitudinal qualitative case studies of data practices in four large, distributed, highly multidisciplinary scientific collaborations. This project follows a 2 ×× 2 research design: two of the collaborations are big science while two are little science, two have completed data collection activities while two are ramping up data collection. This paper is centered on one of these collaborations, a project bringing together scientists to study subseafloor microbial life. This collaboration is little science, characterized by small teams, using small amounts of data, to address specific questions. Our case study employs participant observation in a laboratory, interviews (n=49n=49 to date) with scientists in the collaboration, and document analysis. We present a data workflow that is typical for many of the scientists working in the observed laboratory. In particular, we show that, although...

Ship space to database: emerging infrastructures for studies of the deep subseafloor biosphere

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Background

An increasing array of scientific fields face a “data deluge.” However, in many fields data are scarce, with implications for their epistemic status and ability to command funding. Consequently, they often attempt to develop infrastructure for data production, management, curation, and circulation. A component of a knowledge infrastructure may serve one or more scientific domains. Further, a single domain may rely upon multiple infrastructures simultaneously. Studying how domains negotiate building and accessing scarce infrastructural resources that they share with other domains will shed light on how knowledge infrastructures shape science.

Methods

We conducted an eighteen-month, qualitative study of scientists studying the deep subseafloor biosphere, focusing on the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI) and the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) and its successor, the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP2). Our...

UCLA, Borgman, Privacy & Information Technology Syllabus, Fall 2017

Thu, 9 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Privacy is a broad topic that covers many disciplines, stakeholders, and concerns. This course addresses the intersection of privacy and information technology, surveying a wide array of topics of concern for research and practice in the information fields. Among the topics covered are the history and changing contexts of privacy; privacy risks and harms; law, policies, and practices; privacy in searching for information, in reading, and in libraries; surveillance, networks, and privacy by design; information privacy of students; uses of learning analytics; privacy associated with government data, at all levels of government; information security, cyber risk; and how privacy and data are governed by universities. We will touch on relationships between privacy, security, and risk; on identification and re-identification of individuals; privacy-enhancing technologies; the Internet of Things; open access to data; drones; and other current issues in privacy and information technology.

Privacy & Information Technology Syllabus, Fall 2017, UCLA

Thu, 9 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Library Cultures of Data Curation: Adventures in Astronomy

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

University libraries are partnering with disciplinary data producers to provide long-term digital curation of research datasets. Managing dataset producer expectations and guiding future development of library services requires understanding the decisions libraries make about curatorial activities, why they make these decisions, and the effects on future data reuse. We present a study, comprising interviews (n=43) and ethnographic observation, of two university libraries who partnered with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) collaboration to curate a significant astronomy dataset. The two libraries made different choices of the materials to curate and associated services, which resulted in different reuse possibilities. Each of the libraries offered partial solutions to the SDSS leaders’ objectives. The libraries’ approaches to curation diverged due to contextual factors, notably the extant infrastructure at their disposal (including technical infrastructure, staff expertise,...

Mobilizing records: re-framing archival description to support human rights

Tue, 9 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract This article seeks to raise consciousness within the field of archival studies in order to foster a generative discussion about how descriptive practices might be expanded, approached differently, or completely rethought. It brings together crosscutting theoretical issues and provides practical examples of mediation in order to mobilize these records in support of human rights work. It first problematizes the foundational archival precept of respect des fonds and its sub-principles of original order and provenance. It then analyzes the necessary transformation of institutional policies and standards in order to foster trust and transparency and identifies structural or system wide strategies for ameliorating past abuses.

Library cultures of data curation: Adventures in astronomy

Tue, 9 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Library cultures of data curation: Adventures in astronomy

Our knowledge of knowledge infrastructures: Lessons learned and future directions

Fri, 5 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Knowledge Infrastructures Workshop conducted at UCLA in February 2020, and funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, revisited the goals and findings of the 2012 workshop held at the University of Michigan. Thirty scholars, from a diverse array of disciplines and backgrounds, charted a course for the next decade of KI research. Such infrastructures are increasingly fragile, and often brittle, in the face of open data and open source, the demise of gatekeepers, and shifting public and private boundaries that redistribute power. Participants identified new methods and new opportunities for studying KI. Among the many scholarly products they proposed are publications, grant proposals, conference sessions, and workshops on the role of libraries in data services, the death and afterlives of KI, misinformation and disinformation in KI, KI in the Anthropocene, “N simplish rules” to grow and sustain KI, university capacities for KI, designing sustainable KI, and inclusion of underrepresented...

Integrating Community Archives into a National Digital Platform: Challenges, Opportunities, and Recommendations

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A White Paper Reporting on the 2016-2017 “Diversifying the Digital Historical Record” Forums

Whose text, whose mining, and to whose benefit?

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Scholarly content has become more difficult to find as information retrieval has devolved from bespoke systems that exploit disciplinary ontologies to keyword search on generic search engines. In parallel, more scholarly content is available through open access mechanisms. These trends have failed to converge in ways that would facilitate text data mining, both for information retrieval and as a research method for the quantitative social sciences. Scholarly content has become open to read without becoming open to mine, due both to constraints by publishers and to lack of attention in scholarly communication. The quantity of available text has grown faster than has the quality. Academic dossier systems are among the means to acquire more quality data for mining. Universities, publishers, and private enterprise may be able to mine these data for strategic purposes, however. On the positive front, changes in copyright may allow more data mining. Privacy, intellectual freedom, and...

Knowledge infrastructures in past, present, and future tense

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Knowledge infrastructures in past, present, and future tense

Conserving ourselves: Embedding significance into conservation decision-making in graduate education

Sat, 7 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Conserving ourselves: Embedding significance into conservation decision-making in graduate education

Displaying Featherwork, What History Tells Us

Sat, 7 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Displaying Featherwork, What History Tells Us

Beyond the Surface: Where Cultural Contexts and Scientific Analyses Meet in Museum Conservation of West African Power Association Helmet Masks

Sat, 7 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Beyond the Surface: Where Cultural Contexts and Scientific Analyses Meet in Museum Conservation of West African Power Association Helmet Masks

Eat what you hear: Gustasonic discourses and the material culture of commercial sound recording

Fri, 6 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This article analyzes discursive linkages between acts of listening and eating within a combined multisensory regime that the authors label the gustasonic. Including both marketing discourses mobilized by the commercial music industry and representations of record consumption in popular media texts, gustasonic discourses have shaped forms and experiences of recorded sound culture from the gramophone era to the present. The authors examine three prominent modalities of gustasonic discourse: (1) discourses that position records as edible objects for physical ingestion; (2) discourses that preserve linkages between listening and eating but incorporate musical recordings into the packaging of other foodstuffs; and (3) discourses of gustasonic distinction that position the listener as someone with discriminating taste. While the gustasonic on one hand serves as an aid to consumerism, it can also cultivate a countervailing collecting impulse that resists music’s commodity status and...

Bishop’s Miter and Infulae, a Feathered Masterpiece from Museo degli Argenti in Florence

Fri, 6 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Bishop’s Miter and Infulae, a Feathered Masterpiece from Museo degli Argenti in Florence

Collaborative Ethnography at Scale: Reflections on 20 years of data integration

Thu, 13 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A 5-year STS project in geography, starting in 1999, evolved into 20 years of data collection about scientific data practices in sensor networks, environmental sciences, biology, seismology, undersea science, biomedicine, astronomy, and other fields. By emulating the ‘team science’ approaches of the scientists studied, the UCLA Center for Knowledge Infrastructures accumulated a comprehensive collection of qualitative data about how scientists generate, manage, use, and reuse data across domains. Building upon Paul N. Edwards’s model of ‘making global data’ – collecting signals via consistent methods, technologies, and policies – to ‘make data global’ – comparing and integrating those data, the research team has managed and exploited these data as a collaborative resource. This article reflects on the social, technical, organizational, economic, and policy challenges the team has encountered in creating new knowledge from data old and new. We reflect on continuity over generations...

Open Data, Grey Data, and Stewardship: Universities at the Privacy Frontier

Tue, 11 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Open Data, Grey Data, and Stewardship: Universities at the Privacy Frontier

Robot life: simulation and participation in the study of evolution and social behavior

Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract This paper explores the case of using robots to simulate evolution, in particular the case of Hamilton’s Law. The uses of robots raises several questions that this paper seeks to address. The first concerns the role of the robots in biological research: do they simulate something (life, evolution, sociality) or do they participate in something? The second question concerns the physicality of the robots: what difference does embodiment make to the role of the robot in these experiments. Thirdly, how do life, embodiment and social behavior relate in contemporary biology and why is it possible for robots to illuminate this relation? These questions are provoked by a strange similarity that has not been noted before: between the problem of simulation in philosophy of science, and Deleuze’s reading of Plato on the relationship of ideas, copies and simulacra.

Data, infrastructure, and stewardship

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Data, infrastructure, and stewardship

Inducing Better Stakeholder Searches for Environmental Information Relevant to Coastal Conservation

Sun, 24 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Inducing Better Stakeholder Searches for Environmental Information Relevant to Coastal Conservation

Data: Unstable in concept and context

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Data: Unstable in concept and context

Unmasking Hate on Twitter: Disrupting Anonymity by Tracking Trolls

Tue, 8 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Notions of free speech and expectations of speaker anonymity are instrumental aspects of online information practice in the United States, which manifest in greater protections for speakers of hate, while making targets of trolling and hate speech more vulnerable. In this chapter, we argue that corporate digital media platforms moderate and manage “free speech” in ways that disproportionately harm vulnerable populations. After being targets of racist and misogynist trolling ourselves, we investigated whether new modes of analysis could identify and strengthen the ties between the online personas of anonymous speakers of hate and their identities in real life, which may present opportunities for intervention to arrest online hate speech, or at least make speakers known to those who are targets or recipients of their speech.

Thorny Problems in Data (-Intensive) Science

Mon, 7 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Thorny Problems in Data (-Intensive) Science

Aggregating the Unseen

Fri, 23 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Forward to the art book: Pix or It Didn't Happen, Byström, A. and Soda, M. (Eds.), Prestel.

Technological Elites, the Meritocracy, and Postracial Myths in Silicon Valley

Thu, 22 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Among modern digital technology elites, myths of meritocracy and intellectual prowess are used as racial and gender markers of white male supremacy that disproportionately consolidate resources away from people of color, particularly African Americans, Latino/as and Native Americans. Investments in meritocratic myths suppress interrogations of racism and discrimination even as the products of digital elites are infused with racial, class, and gender markers. Longstanding struggles for social, political, and economic inclusion for African Americans, women, and other legally protected classes have been predicated upon the recognition of systemic exclusion, forced labor, and structural disenfranchisement, and commitments to US public policies like affirmative action have, likewise, been fundamental to political reforms geared to economic opportunity and participation. The rise of the digital technocracy has, in many ways, been antithetical to these sustained efforts to recognize...

Whose Science? Whose Data? Whose Evidence?

Thu, 8 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Whose Science? Whose Data? Whose Evidence?

Jupyter notebooks as discovery mechanisms for open science: Citation practices in the astronomy community

Tue, 6 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Citing data and software is a means to give scholarly credit and to facilitate access to research objects. Citation principles encourage authors to provide full descriptions of objects, with stable links, in their papers. As Jupyter notebooks aggregate data, software, and other objects, they may facilitate or hinder citation, credit, and access to data and software. We report on a study of references to Jupyter notebooks in astronomy over a 5-year period (2014-2018). References increased rapidly, but fewer than half of the references led to Jupyter notebooks that could be located and opened. Jupyter notebooks appear better suited to supporting the research process than to providing access to research objects. We recommend that authors cite individual data and software objects, and that they stabilize any notebooks cited in publications. Publishers should increase the number of citations allowed in papers and employ descriptive metadata-rich citation styles that facilitate credit...

Type-token theory and bibliometrics

Mon, 5 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Type-token theory and bibliometrics

Information science is neither

Mon, 5 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Information science is neither

Archival IR: Applying and adapting information retrieval approaches in archives and recordkeeping research

Mon, 5 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Archival IR: Applying and adapting information retrieval approaches in archives and recordkeeping research

“Owning Critical Archival Studies: A Plea”

Mon, 5 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

“Owning Critical Archival Studies: A Plea”

Presentation for GSIS2016: Representation, Symbolic Annihilation and the Emotional Potential of Community Archives

Mon, 5 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Since the late 1970s, feminist media scholars have used the term “symbolic annihilation” to denote how strong women characters are absent, grossly under-represented, maligned, or trivialized by mainstream television programming, news outlets, and magazine coverage. In the wake of this absence, minoritized communities fail to see themselves or their place in the world. In archival studies, the concept of symbolic annihilation has recently has been used to describe the affective impact on the South Asian American community of being excluded, silenced or misrepresented in mainstream archival collections. The proposed paper builds on and expands this research by examining the affective impact of both exclusion and representation in archives on members of communities that have coalesced around and been marginalized because of ethnic, racial, gender, sexual, and/or political identities. Based on more than a dozen in-depth qualitative interviews with practitioners at several...

Abuse

Wed, 10 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Abuse

Why Data Sharing and Reuse in Biomedicine are Hard to Do

Tue, 18 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Why Data Sharing and Reuse in Biomedicine are Hard to Do

Left Behind: Futurist Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth

Wed, 13 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

For this special issue of b2o, we explore Musk’s SpaceX, the NSA’s control room, Biosphere 2, HI-SEAS, and Apple’s new “Spaceship” headquarters. In these projects and artifacts we find highly politicized deployments of Silicon Valley-style scitech, masked as concerned with escape from planet Earth while necessarily downplaying and denying their impetus: the deleterious, long-term effects of human-induced, industrial-scale problems such as resource extraction, environmental destruction, and war. Linked theoretically, conceptually, and politically, both to each other and to their unacknowledged, obfuscated philosophical origins in accelerationism and technological nihilism, these endeavors and their proponents in government and tech sectors represent the ultimate expression of reality TV’s much-discussed “preppers,” ready to start anew somehow and somewhere else. In a final turn, this paper contrasts such endeavors with Trump-era protectionist values (e.g., increased military spending;...

Troubling Accounts of the Archives

Tue, 5 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This article unravels on archival mystery by tracing the creation and archivization of a series of photographs staged by Sharanjit Singh Dhillonn, an Indian immigrant, in Oklahoma in the 1950s. The collection has been digitized and made accessible in the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), a community archive that is using records to spark conversations about racism, assimilation, and resistance. The article argues that community archives can activate troubling records from the past in order to forge relationships of care and mutual responsibility with their communities now.

The principles of tomorrow's university

Thu, 27 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In the 21st Century, research is increasingly data- and computation-driven. Researchers, funders, and the larger community today emphasize the traits of openness and reproducibility. In March 2017, 13 mostly early-career research leaders who are building their careers around these traits came together with ten university leaders (presidents, vice presidents, and vice provosts), representatives from four funding agencies, and eleven organizers and other stakeholders in an NIH- and NSF-funded one-day, invitation-only workshop titled "Imagining Tomorrow's University." Workshop attendees were charged with launching a new dialog around open research – the current status, opportunities for advancement, and challenges that limit sharing.The workshop examined how the internet-enabled research world has changed, and how universities need to change to adapt commensurately, aiming to understand how universities can and should make themselves competitive and attract the best students, staff,...

Big Science, Little Science, and Open Science: Sustainability, Stewardship, and Knowledge Infrastructures

Tue, 4 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Conference on the National Open Science Plan for France: From Strategy to Action

Paris, 4 December 2018

As France launches a national plan for open science that spans open access publishing, open access to data, and integration with international partnerships on scholarly sustainability, the country is taking a leap forward in developing new knowledge infrastructures – robust networks of people, artifacts, and institutions for producing, exchanging, and sustaining knowledge. Research data have become scholarly objects in their own right, to be released, shared, and reused. Publications and datasets are distinct genres that serve scholarship in complementary ways. Data sharing is a complex and labor-intensive process, and data reuse is even more so. Whereas data sharing policies presume that research data are useful to others and that others will reuse those data, neither outcome is assured. Concerns for data sharing and open access raise questions about what data...

The invisible knowledge infrastructure of astronomy: A sharper focus on blurry data

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Age-old patterns of research and publication were disrupted as scholarship moved online. Astronomy now conducts research at scales of data collection that were unforeseeable in the days of glass plates – and yet those glass plates, famously stored at CfA, remain valuable as records of irreproducible observations. Keeping digital data “alive” at scale is proving to be a complex and expensive challenge. Astronomy has built a particularly robust network of people, artifacts, and institutions for producing, exchanging, and sustaining knowledge that links publications, telescopes, digital data archives, and other scientific resources – a knowledge infrastructure. My research fellowship at CfA for October 2018 is devoted to advancing a decade-long study of astronomy data practices to ask questions about the durability and fragility of these infrastructures and the invisible work required to sustain access to data, tools, instruments, publications, documentation, and other infrastructure...

Erratum

Tue, 6 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Erratum

Open Data, Grey Data, and Stewardship: Universities at the Privacy Frontier

Wed, 17 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Berkman Klein Luncheon Series

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Wednesday October 10 2018

The growth in availability of digital data resources is changing university practice in more ways than most faculty, administrators, and students are aware. Researchers provide open access to their data as a condition for obtaining grant funding or publishing results in journals, leading to an explosion of available scholarly content. Universities have automated many aspects of teaching, instruction, student services, libraries, personnel management, building management, and finance, leading to a profusion of discrete data about the activities of individuals. Many of these data, both research and operational, fall outside privacy regulations such as HIPAA, FERPA, and PII. Universities see great value of these data for learning analytics, faculty evaluation, strategic decisions, and other sensitive matters. Commercial entities, governments, and private individuals also see...

If Data Sharing is the Answer, What is the Question?

Wed, 3 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Data sharing has become normative policy enforced by governments, funding agencies, journals, and other stakeholders. Reasons for data sharing include leveraging investments in research, reducing the need to collect new data, addressing new research questions by reusing or combining extant data, and reproducing research, which would lead to greater accountability, transparency, and less fraud. Much of the scholarship on data practices attempts to understand the sociotechnical barriers to sharing, with goals to design infrastructures, policies, and cultural interventions that will overcome these barriers. Yet data sharing and reuse are common practice in only a few fields. Astronomy and genomics in the sciences, survey research in the social sciences, and archaeology in the humanities are the typical exemplars, and remain the exceptions rather than the rule. The lack of success of data sharing policies, despite accelerating enforcement over the last decade, indicates the need not...

The Data Conservancy: Science-driven Information Science

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Data Conservancy –which is a National Science Foundation funded Datanet project with a diverse array of partners – embraces a shared vision: data curation is not an end, but rather a means to collect, organize, validate, and preserve data to address grand research challenges that face society. Key to the data conservancy approach is information science research on the data practices of the science domains. Three teams are conducting social studies of individual science domains. Prof. Carole Palmer of the University of Illinois will report on their comparative studies of multiple biosciences domains. Prof. Christine Borgman of the University of California, Los Angeles, will report on their studies of astronomers. We are in the first year of the project, and will focus on our research questions, methods, and what we hope to learn from this 5-year project. http://www.ibi.hu-berlin.de/institut/veranstaltungen/bbk/bbk-material/abstracts/

Digital Libraries: Now here, or nowhere? (Keynote)

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Digital libraries have matured over the 15+ years since the term was coined. Yet the term “digital libraries” has never come into general use outside of a select group of conferences and journals. Have digital libraries been subsumed under the rubric of cyberinfrastructure and eResearch? Have they fallen prey to the eternal debates between the (digital) library of the future and the future of (digital) libraries? Has a focus on technology obscured the larger questions of social practice that surround digital libraries? Or is digital library research at an inflection point, in a pivotal position to respond to the next wave of challenges for an information society?

Open data, grey data, and stewardship: Universities at the privacy frontier

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As universities recognize the inherent value in the data they collect and hold, they encounter unforeseen challenges in stewarding those data in ways that balance accountability, transparency, and protection of privacy, academic freedom, and intellectual property. Two parallel developments in academic data collection are converging: (1) open access requirements, whereby researchers must provide access to their data as a condition of obtaining grant funding or publishing results in journals; and (2) the vast accumulation of “grey data” about individuals in their daily activities of research, teaching, learning, services, and administration. The boundaries between research and grey data are blurring, making it more difficult to assess the risks and responsibilities associated with any data collection. Many sets of data, both research and grey, fall outside privacy regulations such as HIPAA, FERPA, and PII. Universities are exploiting these data for research, learning analytics,...

Scholarship in the Digital Age: Blurring the Boundaries between the Sciences and the Humanities (Keynote)

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As the digital humanities mature, their scholarship is taking on many characteristics of the sciences, becoming more data-intensive, information-intensive, distributed, multi-disciplinary, and collaborative. While few scholars in the humanities or arts would wish to be characterized as emulating scientists, they do envy the comparatively rich technical and resource infrastructure of the sciences. The interests of all scholars in the university align with respect to access to data, library resources, and computing infrastructure. However, the scholarly interests of the sciences and humanities diverge regarding research practices, sources of evidence, and degrees of control over those sources. This talk will explore the common and competing interests of disciplines for scholarship in the digital age.

The Digital Archive: The Data Deluge arrives in the Humanities

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The data deluge has began to overwhelm the sciences, as instruments such as sensor networks and space telescopes are generating far more data than can possibly be inspected manually. Only digital tools can make sense of these vast volumes of data. As the humanities draw more heavily on digital archives, their scholarship is taking on many characteristics of the sciences, becoming more data-intensive, information-intensive, distributed, multi-disciplinary, and collaborative. However, the humanities typically lack the technical infrastructure available to the sciences. The scholarly interests of the sciences and humanities also diverge with respect to research practices, sources of evidence, and degrees of control over those sources. This talk will explore some of the challenges facing humanities scholars in mining digital archives.

The Digital Future is Now: What the Humanities can Learn from eScience

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Research Library of the Future: Less Selection, More Curation

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Only a decade ago, this definition of a research library seemed adequate (Borgman, 2000, p.38): Librarians tend to take a broad view of the concept of a library. In general terms, they see libraries as organizations that select, collect, organize, conserve, preserve, and provide access to information on behalf of a community of users. Revisiting this definition today, libraries seem both broader and narrower in scope. The scope is narrower in that libraries are doing far less selecting and collecting of journals as they move from purchase to lease models. Research libraries rapidly are approaching the “e-only tipping point” (Johnson & Luther, 2007) for journals, and some predict that the e-only tipping point for books is not too far away (Connaway & Wicht, 2007; Sandler, Armstrong & Nardini, 2007). Libraries also are doing fewer of the organizing tasks for their core collections, as digital catalog records accompany digital books, and as more printed books arrive “shelf-ready”...

The Sensed vs Sensing in Embedded Networked Sensing Data and data sharing at an ENS research center