I had the great privilege of being selected as a Sackler Symposium Student Fellow this year. The Fellows Symposium had 48 speakers presenting their work, and it was a long and wonderful whirlwind. You can see all of it at the early end of the #CreateCollab2018 hashtag. ...
For posterity, a few threads from this past week’s Sackler Colloquium. Maneesh Agrawala’s talk deconstructing data visualizations .@magrawala is deconstructing charts and graphs for us at #createcollab2018 @theNASciences — nikki stevens (@drnikki) March 13, 2018 A thread on Fernanda Viegas’s talk about Visualization in Machine Learning ...
This month I didn’t do a very good job of what I’d tried to do last month - which is focus on only a few things. I read widely for a few reasons ...
This month, I’m focused on getting a few big presentations ready, and writing a three large projects. I’m trying not to get interested in anything new (which is hard, because there’s so many good and interesting things!), but instead to produce something from all of my questioning last semester. ...
i write code in public… Over the semester break, I cleaned up my filing system and archived all of the writing that I did last semester - approximately 30,000 words. As I was putting it away, and sometimes even as I was writing it, I thought - what a shame that I can’t do anything else with all of this work… ...
(this was originally posted on the HASTAC website as part of my HASTAC 17-19 Scholars participation.) The bibliography that follows is a first iteration of works that I’m gathering to explore epistemological and structural parallels between distributed ledger technology (aka blockchain) and whisper networks (as defined as “An informal chain of conversations among members of an oppressed or marginalized group about oppressors who need to be watched because of predatory behavior” expanded from definition here). I’m curious about similar protocols for membership, (de)escalation of information, and shared ownership of knowledge. It seems to me that maybe the blockchain could be a first attempt at digitally representing something close to the organic way that secrets are shared among trusted groups. ...
(this was originally posted on the HASTAC website as part of my HASTAC 17-19 Scholars participation.) I started a PhD program this semester, and I vowed not to repeat some of the mistakes of my master's thesis. I mean, I made many mistakes, but two are relevant here: ...
The semester is finally over! I made it out without too many tears, and I spent the semester break doing some school reading but mostly I read junk and loved it. ...
November was a shorter school month, and was mostly filled with doing everything I could to get things ready for spring and wrapped up for fall. I did a lot of writing for assignments and projects, and made a conscious effort to not read more than I needed to and to instead work to integrate what I’d already read. ...
I spent October juggling projects (many not my own), and found that I was returning to some fundamental questions that I left unanswered (or didn’t answer satisfactorily) at the start of the semester: ...
Sharing some thoughts about Robert Pielke’s The Honest Broker and whether it’s applicable to technology contexts. Often, when we talk about science and technology, we talk about them as one field: “science and technology.” We acknowledge the imaginaries of both and then combine them into an even more monolithic imaginary of S&T. However, Pielke only discusses science. What, then, of technology in his framework? ...
I spent September struggling to stay afloat. The way work was structured, I was able to spend time thinking about fewer ideas, but exploring them more fully. This month, those ideas were: ...
Before it all evaporates into internet ephemera, and in lieu of a proper blog post, here is my OSSummit in tweets: Say hi if you are also at #OSSummit pic.twitter.com/hpr0xOLYgH — nikki stevens (@drnikki) September 11, 2017 .@realdanlyons is 💥💣talking about the toxicity of startups and the gig economy at #OSSummit pic.twitter.com/UGz93CCPEY ...
I spent August getting used to being back in class, and thinking about: how do engineers think about engineering ethics on a day-to-day basis (if at all)? just because we can build something, does that mean we should? do engineering ethics stop with the technological product (in the case of software) or do they extend to the interactions engineers have with each other? why did the engineering profession develop in the way that it did? and (as always) what role does capitalism play in any of the above? Below is a list of books and articles I read this month. Angwin, J., Savage, C., Larson, J., Moltke, H., Poitras, L., & Risen, J. (2015, August 15). AT&T Helped U.S. Spy on Internet on a Vast Scale. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/us/politics/att-helped-nsa-spy-on-an-array-of-internet-traffic.html ASCE Code of Ethics. (2006). Barry-Jester, A. M., Casselman, B., & Goldstein, D. (2015, August 4). Should Prison Sentences Be Based On Crimes That Haven’t Been Committed Yet? Retrieved from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/prison-reform-risk-assessment/ Beiser, V. (n.d.). The Deadly Global War for Sand. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2015/03/illegal-sand-mining/ Chełkowski, T., Gloor, P., & Jemielniak, D. (2016). Inequalities in Open Source Software Development: Analysis of Contributor’s Commits in Apache Software Foundation Projects. PLOS ONE, 11(4), e0152976. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152976 Downey, G. L. (2007). Low Cost, Mass Use: American Engineers and the Metrics of Progress. History and Technology, 23(3), 289–308. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341510701300387 Epstein, S. (1996). Drugs Into Bodies. In Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (pp. 208–234). University of California Press. Franklin, S. (2007). Origins. In Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (pp. 1–45). Duke University Press. Gusterson, H. (1999). Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination. Cultural Anthropology, 14(1), 111–143. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1999.14.1.111 Hudson, M. (n.d.). Kosovars Who Rebuilt War-Torn Village Face New Threat As World Bank Considers Coal-Burning Power Plant. Retrieved from http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/projects/worldbank-evicted-abandoned/kosovo-war-torn-village-coal-burning-power-plant Kelty, C. (2005). Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics. Cultural Anthropology, 20(2), 185–214. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2005.20.2.185 Layton, E. T. (1971). Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (1st edition, edition). Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press. Mehlman, A. (2015, August). The Genesis Engine. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2015/07/crispr-dna-editing-2/ Miller, C. (2015). Knowledge and Democracy: The Epistemics of Self-Governance. In Science and Democracy: Making Knowledge and Making Power in the Biosciences and Beyond. (pp. 198–219). London: Routledge. Naparat, D., Finnegan, P., & Cahalane, M. (2015). Healthy Community and Healthy Commons: ‘Opensourcing’ as a Sustainable Model of Software Production. Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 19(0). https://doi.org/10.3127/ajis.v19i0.1221 Noble, D. F. (1979). America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pollan, M. (2009, July 29). Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02cooking-t.html Rajan, K. S. (2003). Genomic Capital: Public Cultures and Market Logics of Corporate Biotechnology. Science as Culture, 12(1), 87–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950543032000062272 Schmalzer, S. (2017). Teaching the History of Radical Science with Materials on Science for the People (1969–1989). Radical History Review, 2017(127), 173–179. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-3690943 Sclove, R. E. (1995). Democracy and Technology (1 edition). New York: The Guilford Press. UCS Founding Document. (n.d.). van de Poel, I., & Verbeek, P.-P. (2006). Editorial: Ethics and Engineering Design. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 31(3), 223–236. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243905285838 Watered-Down Gen Ed for Engineers? (n.d.). Retrieved September 5, 2017, from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/06/26/faculty-members-criticize-proposed-changes-gen-ed-accreditation-standards-engineers Zou, L., & Cheryan, S. (2015). When Whites’ Attempts to Be Multicultural Backfire in Intergroup Interactions. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 9(11), 581–592. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12203 ...
I spent July thinking about open source community health: how do measures of open source project success interact with measures of community health? (they don’t, because no measures of community health exist) what would a “healthy” open source community look like? who has the right to determine what is healthy and for whom? how can we design a study to measure community health in a way that centers voices not typically heard in tech. if we make communities ‘healthy,’ will they also become safer for marginalized folks? Below is a list of books and articles I read this month. ...
I have often thought, “I wish I knew what people in [insert name of PhD program] were reading.” because I wanted to do that same reading. Some courses had syllabi available, some had notes, but it was hard to get a sense of the themes that were being discussed. I told myself that if I were ever lucky enough to be able enter a PhD program, I’d share as much as I could about the material I was reading. ...
Nick and I met at Drupalcon New Orleans to discuss doing a survey to get some data about the diversity within the community of people who make the internet. Many such surveys have been done (here two: Slack and New Relic) but we wanted approach everything differently. Both of us have a long history of open source involvement and deeply believe in open-source philosophies. We wanted to do a survey completely in the open, and completely transparently. We have been guided by the philosophy of “Nothing about us, without us.” ...
At Drupalcon New Orleans, I held a BOF entitled “Keeping it Exciting After All these Years.” It was a small group - seven people, including myself. We discussed some the ways that we find technology work to have transformed from genuine enthusiasm resembling “I can’t believe people pay me to do this!” to something akin to drudgery or menial tasks. ...
Making bad hiring choices I’ve been actively interviewing and part of the hiring process for engineers, project managers and product owners for the last 8 years. In that time, I’ve probably hired about 30 people (fewer if you exclude long-term contractors) to work with me directly, and been a voice at the table for the hiring of about another 20 people. The majority of the people to whom I’ve given jobs have worked out wonderfully and I’d be happy to work with nearly all of them again. ...
Several times in my career, I’ve entered companies with the opportunity to “build my own team.” For whatever reason (and that reason will become important later), the company had been outsourcing all of their web development to an (often offshore) agency. In retrospect, I know now that we should have ...