I’m so excited to give a talk at MIT on Tuesday. I’ll be talking about reverse engineering. If I need to sound fancy about it, I will tell you that “reverse engineering is a logic and approach that is core to my method.” Put more plainly, I use reverse engineering and other “take it apart and figure out how it works” approaches to academic software research. Details (and poster!) below. ...
At the end of July, I was appointed Bradford, Vermont’s Interim Town Health Officer (THO), after the resignation of our previous officer. This is a new role for me, so I reached out to VLCT for information on what THO do. Here’s what I found out ...
There have been a lot of questions lately about who gets to speak (and otherwise participate) in SelectBoard meetings. Here’s what I know: The Selectboard is governed by Vermont’s Open Meeting Law (The specific statute - 1 V.S.A. § 312) VLCT offers FAQs about the Open Meeting Law. These might be locked behind their login screen, so here is a PDF of that page VLCT offers Model Rules of Procedure for SelectBoards without their own bylaws In conversation with VLCT, they note that the spirit of the law is to err on the side of allowing more participation than less, within “reasonable” limits.
The information below is part of a larger conversation about Open Source Program (or Project) Offices (OSPOs)in academic (university) settings. Ways to Contribute [VERSO] has compiled a list of ways to contribute to open source, especially if you are not a coder. ...
This week I got to present at DrupalCon (again! I love the Drupal community) and talk about what it means to think about making software with transgender users in mind. Given the diverse audience, the talk is also a bit of a trans 101. ...
Since my first semester in graduate school, I’ve been posting my reading lists and general themes for the month. Since my comprehensive exams in May, I have certainly been reading, though not nearly as much. I took some time off, moved to the Dartmouth area and began working as a researcher and lab manager of the Digital Justice Lab, a lab in the Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Cluster. ...
As part of a series of posts that I’ve been calling “Open Source PhD,” I’m posting some of the materials that I prepared as I was studying for my comprehensive exams. You can see the reading lists for those exams here. ...
This week I attended three conferences - The Rightful Place of Science, Digital Democracies, and HASTAC 2019. The three were very different, but each gave me an opportunity to interact with other grad students and with professors of all levels. It was wonderful and exhausting. At HASTAC 2019, the plenary talks invoked themes of connection, of community. Speakers cited specifically where they learned a concept (“from an elder in Treaty 3”), why they used a particular framework (because it was used “by an elder who I’m accountable to”), and made a point to acknowledge the roles of other people in all of their work. ...
Hi. In a way, everything feels terrible right now, doesn’t it? I’m pretty tired of feeling terrible, and super tired of feeling like the country is in a new level of shit, when - let’s be honest - it’s been shit for everyone but white men since the beginning. I hear a lot of people feeling powerless; folks are tired. Me too, y’all (and #metoo). ...
Until this month, I tracked each book that I read and shared them here. During the spring semester, I’m reading for my comprehensive exams and so already know what I’ll be reading for the next few months. I’m focusing on three areas: software engineering ethics, intersectional STS (science and technology studies), and the social history of computing. Once I’ve read all of these, I’ll write a long paper (about 8,000 words, or ~16 single-spaced pages) about what I’ve read. Then, I’ll sit for an oral exam with my committee. Then, I’m done! (Nothing left to do but a quick little dissertation.) ...
This is just a quick overview post on what’s happening with Drupal.org (owned by the Drupal Association) collecting demographic information on it’s members. The current proposal is that the user profile form will have fields at least for gender and “ideally” for other demographic categories (race, sexual orientation, etc) ...
This month marked the LAST SEMESTER OF PHD COURSEWORK for me. I completed another draft of my second year project, a revise and resubmit (accepted!), and got my comprehensive exam reading lists approved. I also spent a lot of time writing and thinking about the Amazon Echo’s role as a provider of legal testimony. Phew. Hopefully I won’t read a single book in December. ...
A deadline for a revise and resubmit meant not a lot of other reading got done. Below was reading required for classes. Abbate, J. (2000). Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Alexander von Humboldt Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft. (n.d.). #AoIR2016: Opening Keynote “The Platform Society” by José van Dijck. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ypiiSQTNqo brown, adrienne maree. (2017). Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press. Cooper, M. E. (2008). Life As Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Crawford, K., Lingel, J., & Karppi, T. (2015). Our metrics, ourselves: A hundred years of self-tracking from the weight scale to the wrist wearable device. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(4–5), 479–496. Eubanks, V. (2011). Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age (1St Edition edition). Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. Ferguson, A. G. (2017). The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement. New York: NYU Press. Haraway, D. J. (1996). Simians Cyborgs and Women. London: Free Association Books. Harding, S. (2008). Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. Jasanoff, S. (2017). Virtual, visible, and actionable: Data assemblages and the sightlines of justice. Big Data & Society, 4(2), 2053951717724477. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717724477 Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Introduction. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York, UNITED STATES: New York University Press. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=865693 Nakamura, L. (2014). Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture. American Quarterly, 66(4), 919–941. Nash, C. J., & Browne, K. (2010). Queer Methods and Methodologies: An Introduction. In Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research. Farnham, UNITED KINGDOM: Taylor & Francis Group. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=554552 Wolfson, T. (n.d.). Strategy Communications and the Switchboard of Struggle. In Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left.
Welp, September is the first full month of the semester and it sure felt like it. This fall I’m in a class on Surveillance and Society with Marisa Duarte and Andrew Brown, and reading a book a week with Emma Frow. Those are reflected below, in addition to some reading for a journal article I’m working on. Next month, it’s back to my second year project and working on reading lists for my comprehensive exams. ...
This summer I wrote my second year project. As I gathered items, it didn’t make sense to list them all as “read” since I did a lot of skimming and extracting rather than wholesale reading. I’ve just sent the first draft of that project to my committee, but I’ll be open sourcing everything about that project when it’s approved. ...
Today, I was honored to give the opening keynote at TexasCamp. The organizing team has done such a good job with this camp that the logistics have become invisible. Below is the video of my talk: ...
This month, I rewrote my second-year project proposal for the third and fourth times. (First and second iterations happened in January and February). Each complete rewrite brought with it a new or expanded set of literature. I also spent ten days traveling to DrupalCon Nashville and the Computing Research Association’s Grad Women’s Cohort. ...
Before it all evaporates into internet ephemera, and in lieu of a proper blog post, here is my DrupalCon in tweets: Great start to the #DrupalCon Community Summit - unconference in progress. pic.twitter.com/u01siSdB4X ...
On March 31, I had the great opportunity to speak at TEDxASU. You can watch the video here:
This month, I spoke at TEDxASU. Preparing for that took nearly all of the time I would have normally spent reading. Oops! In my main seminar, we were assigned a few books instead of a slew of articles, so it’s a short list. ...