Summer 2023 Fellows

• Oforiwaa Pee Agyei-Boakye
  “BRT in Johannesburg”
  Geography, Environment and Society
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Environment: Advancing Industry, Conserving our Environment
   
• Camille Braun
  “Centering the Voices of People who Use Drugs in Strategies to Address the Overdose Crisis”
  Spanish and Portuguese Studies
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Brain Conditions: Discoveries and Treatments for Brain Conditions
   
• Alter Hajek
  “The moveable organ”
  Art
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Brain Conditions: Discoveries and Treatments for Brain Conditions
   
• DeWitt King
  “Infinite Supply: The Politics of Black Disposability in Sports”
  American Studies
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Brain Conditions: Discoveries and Treatments for Brain Conditions
   
• Valeria Lopez Torres
  Strange love: emotional entanglements between humans and chatbots
  College of Design
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Robotics: Robotics, Sensors, and Advanced Manufacturing
   
• Ibrahim Oker
  “Food Subsidy Policies in Authoritarian Regimes”
  Political Science
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Global Food Ventures
   
• Jaan Sharma Pathak
  “Combining Remote Sensing and Qualitative Research to Study Riverine Erosion in the Brahmaputra River Valley (India)”
  Geography, Environment and Society
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Environment: Advancing Industry, Conserving our Environment

• Catherine Bruns
  “Wine, Water, and Ways of Life: Mapping Community Wine Knowledge in Andalusia, Spain”
  Communication Studies
  MnDRIVE Thematic Areas: Global Food Ventures & Environment
   
• Kadir Yavuz Emiroglu
  “Mapping Interviews in Ankara: Seeking Human within an Authoritarian City”
  Anthropology
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Environment
   
• Isaac Espósto
  “The Architecture and Algorithms of Borderland Confinement”
  Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies
  MnDRIVE Thematic Areas: Robotics & Environment
   
• Aidan Neher
  “Network Analysis of Minnesota’s Aquatic Invasive Species Information Flows”
  Biostatistics
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Environment
   
• Florencia Pech Cardenas
  “Linking TEK with Western Ecological Knowledge to Understand Forest Management and Governance in Maya Communities”
  Forest Resources
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Environment
   
• Katherine Pierpont
  “Building Community: Mapping the property of 12th century sex workers”
  History
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Environment
   
• Pawan Sharma
  “Moving Tracts : Cuisines, Cultures, Communities from South Asia”
  Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Global Food Ventures
   
• Michael Valdez
  “Palestine in your Parish: Church Performance and the Shaping of British Public Opinion on Middle East Expansion, 1891 to 1917”
  Theatre Arts & Dance
  MnDRIVE Thematic Areas: Global Food Ventures & Environment

• Nicholas Bauch
  “The Shape of Water: Re-mediating limnological shape files into physical form” 
  Art, College of Liberal Arts
  MnDRIVE Area: Environment
   
• Christian Bell
  “Performing Citizen Science: Facilitating Interdisciplinary Creative Collaborations for a Public Audience at Franconia Sculpture Park” 
  Theatre Arts and Dance, College of Liberal Arts
  MnDRIVE Area: Global Food
   
• Elizabeth Calhoun
  “Our Unhoused Neighbors Are Our Neighbors: Encampments, Housing Affordability and Gentrification in Minneapolis”
  Geography, Environment, and Society; College of Liberal Arts
  MnDRIVE Area: Environment
   
• Yun Feng
  “Between Limited Physical Space and Limitless Digital Space: Shifting Subjectivities within ‘Taobao Villages’ in Contemporary Rural China”
  Anthropology, College of Liberal Arts
  MnDRIVE Areas: Robotics, Global Food
   
• Snigdha Kumar
  “Banking on/with Big Data: Decoding Value in India's Financial Technology Industry”
  Sociology, College of Liberal Arts
  MnDRIVE Area: Robotics
   
• Stephanie Lindquist
  “Intergenerational Data in Art: Women Relearning Indigenous Food Sovereignty in Gorama Mende, Sierra Leone”
  Art, College of Liberal Arts
  MnDIVE Area: Global Food
   
• Adam Negri
  “CTE and Research Paradigms: Advocating for Equity in Trauma-Related Brain Disease”
  History of Medicine, Medical School
  MnDRIVE Area: Brain Conditions
   
• Brieanna Watters
  “Geographic Isolation and Indefinite Detention: Spatial and Temporal Inequality among American Indians in Pre-Trial Detention”
  Sociology, College of Liberal Arts
  MnDRIVE Areas: Robotics, Environment

2020 Fellows

• Manami Bhattacharya
  “The effect of mental illness on outcomes among older women with breast cancer”
  Health Policy and Management, School of Public Health
   
• Yuming Fang
  Empowered social bots: Content analysis of bots-created anti-vaccine information on Twitter
  Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, College of Liberal Arts
   
• Johnathan Hardy
  Ornithological Empire: A Spatio-Analytical Approach to Mapping the Qing Dynasty’s Compendium of Birds (鳥譜, niaopu) (1736 – 1795 CE)
  Department of Art History, College of Liberal Arts
   
• Milica Milic-Kolarevic
  Law of Gift Gratitude: Serbian Oncology Practices
  Department of Anthropology, College of Liberal Arts
   
• Jennifer Nicklay
  Community Land and Food Lab Meetings: Facilitating Co-Learning Spaces for Urban Agriculture in Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN
  Department of Soil, Water, and Climate, College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences
   
• Prerna
  Aerial Eyes 1
  Department of Art, College of Liberal Arts
   
• Hayden Teachout
  Aerial Eyes 1
  Department of Art, College of Liberal Arts
   
• Sultan Toprak Oker
  Harmony of Discordance: Machine Vision, Alcohol Networks, and Taverns
  Department of History, College of Liberal Arts
   
• Rebecca Walker
  Critical Cartography for Urban Environmental Planning: Exploring the role of participatory mapping in the quest for environmentally just cities
  Humphrey School of Public Affairs
  
   

• Emma Bedor Hiland: (En)coding Inclusiveness in Smartphone Applications for Mentally Disordered Users
  This project explores the development of smartphone applications intended to treat mental disorder. Unlike other genres of mobile medical interventions, their creation often includes developers or consultants who have personal experience with mental illness. I suggest this presents a valuable model for inclusivity and diversity in coding.
   
• Deniz Coral: Markets with Many Faces: The Role of Screens in the Financial Imagination
  This project explores the humanistic aspect of big data by investigating how the data appears on computer screens is culturally produced and interpreted by financial players. While screens are generally taken for granted either as mediums or background context of finance, this project challenges this perspective by exploring the ways in which financial players engage with their screens are pivotal for the visualization of financial data, which is contingent upon larger relationships of trust and institutional hierarchy.
   
• Alexander Fink: Locating Human Possibility and Aspirations in Social Service Mass Data Collection Systems
  This project collaborates with a team of young people in a Youth Participatory Action Research study to critically investigate and understand the impacts of big data collection in social services on their lives, especially their sense of future possibility and aspirations.
   
• Amelia Hassoun: Big Data, Big Futures: Imagining the Singaporean Smart Nation
  My dissertation project analyzes the production of Singapore as the world’s first truly ‘smart city’: a state-space enacting a data-driven future. Through ethnographic study, I examine how big data gathered from civic technologies inscribed in the urban fabric enumerates Singapore’s exceptionally diverse citizenry and brings imagined futures into being.
   
• Katelin Krieg: Victorian Data Analysis and Visualization
  We assume that we have little to learn from Victorian Britain about data analysis and visualization. However, the correlation coefficient and scatterplot both emerged during this period. I juxtapose their inventors, Karl Pearson and Francis Galton, with novelist George Meredith to argue that these statistical and literary representations develop from the same philosophical concerns and had the same knowledge goals.
   
• Alicia Lazzarini: Critically Expanding ‘Data’: Methods for Examining a Southern African Sugar Success
  My research expands the notion of data. Mobilizing qualitative, ethnographic and archival methods, I examine a sugar mill’s expansion data and development claims. Addressing labor and land, I analyze disconnects between industry and resident views of investment. I argue: development decisions must be made through diverse, not narrow information forms.
   
• Lars MacKenzie: Accounting for Change: Big Data, Gender Transition and Financial Surveillance of Identity
  Big data has transformed financial services, enabling massive collection and networking of consumer data. This research examines how financial institutions manage data about transgender people who change their names, investigating how humans are produced, managed, regulated and normalized through data. I demonstrate that data enables multiple forms of discrimination against transgender people.
   
• Stephen Savignano: Interaction / Machination: Thinking Machines through Interactive Computation
  My proposed research examines interactive paradigms in computer science, and the significance of understanding computation through interactions rather than algorithms. Anchored in the idea of artificial intelligence, interaction highlights humanizing possibilities and inhuman obstacles to asking, “Where is the human in the data?”
   
• Link Swanson: User interfaces and the epistemology of the new computational cognitive revolution
  A recent trend in cognitive science leverages large-scale online databases to study human cognition. I argue that the viability of this approach hinges on a key epistemological concern: the role of the user interface in online data creation. I detail this concern and consider possible ways to address it.
   
• Madison Van Oort: Well-Dressed Data: Workplace Surveillance in the World’s Top Retailers
  Data-based workplace monitoring is increasingly crucial to retail companies’ ability to slash labor costs. This ethnographic study of the booming fast fashion industry—which sells high volumes of trendy, cheap clothing—investigates how new management software gathers data about worker performance and shapes front-line employees’ relationships to work.
   

October 3, 2016
10 Questions for Critical Data Studies Workshop

Inclusiveness in smartphone apps, gender transition and financial surveillance of identity, workplace surveillance among the world’s top retailers . . . this workshop werved as the launching point for a critical data science study project that was jointly sponsored by the University of Minnesota Informatics Institute and the Institute for Advanced Study for the 2016 cohort of Human in the Data fellows, who participated in lightning talks and table discussions, developing “10 Questions for Critical Data Studies.” Click through to Youtube for the full schedule of presenters.

NOVEMBER 18, 2021  •  3:30 p.m.
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, Sociology, College of Liberal Arts, UMN Twin Cities

This talk explores racial disparities in mortality during U.S. pandemics, using the 1918 and COVID-19 pandemics to develop general frameworks for understanding inequality in pandemic experiences—and what they reveal about inequality during ordinary, non-pandemic times. The first part of the talk considers racial disparities during the most devastating respiratory pandemic of the 20^th century, the 1918 flu; shows that those disparities were surprisingly small; and develops new hypotheses, grounded in social immunology, to account for this anomaly. The second part of the talk pivots from 1918 to 2020. During the 1918 pandemic, U.S. white mortality was still lower than U.S. Black mortality had been nearly every year. Today, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the same pattern holds: despite the pandemic, white mortality in 2020 was likely less than Black mortality has ever been. Using pandemic mortality as a measuring stick for racial disparities offers a new perspective on the measures we do — and do not — embrace in order to combat racial inequality. I use demographic mortality models to make a new, demographically based case for reparations for racism.

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field is an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Sociology and the Minnesota Population Center. She specializes in racial inequality in mortality and historical infectious disease and co-leads (with J.P. Leider) an ongoing project on COVID-19 mortality in Minnesota. She is also a quantitative methodologist, developing models designed to clarify relationships between micro and macro perspectives on demographic relationships.

Amelia McNamara
Computer & Information Sciences, University of St. Thomas

Borders often do not have much to do with the physical world. The edges of voting districts, cities, counties, states, and countries are decided by human processes, always implicitly if not explicitly political. Data are often provided pre­aggregated at a particular spatial polygon level. For example, data on poverty is collected at the block­group level, while data on education is easiest to obtain for school districts. This makes it difficult to combine data, and can lead to problems when data does not make sense at the level it was collected. In this talk, Amelia McNamara discusses issues related to spatial polygon choices, like gerrymandering and the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem.

Ece Kamar
Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group, Microsoft

While many celebrated efforts in Artificial Intelligence aim at exceeding human performance, the real promise of AI in real-world domains, such as healthcare and law, hinges on developing systems that can successfully support human experts. In this talk, Ece Kamar shares several directions of research her team at Microsoft is pursuing towards effective human-AI partnership in the open world, including combining the complementary strengths of human and machine reasoning, addressing concerns around trust, transparency and reliability, and using AI to improve human engagement.

Sorelle Friedler
Data & Society Research Institute, Haverford College

Machine learning models are becoming increasingly opaque to human examination, even to their designers. Yet these models are also increasingly used to make high-stakes decisions; who goes to jail, what neighborhoods police deploy to, and who should be hired for a job. But how can we practically achieve accountability and transparency in the face of increasingly complex models? And how do we know if the algorithmic decisions are fair or discriminatory—what does it mean for an algorithm to be fair? Sorelle Friedler discusses work from the new and growing field of Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in machine learning, examines societal notions of fairness and non-discrimination, and explains how these notions have been defined using a mathematical framework. She also discusses recently developed strategies for auditing black-box models when given access to their inputs and outputs and for white-box interpretability in decision-making.

October 3, 2016
10 Questions for Critical Data Studies Workshop

Inclusiveness in smartphone apps, gender transition and financial surveillance of identity, workplace surveillance among the world’s top retailers . . . this workshop werved as the launching point for a critical data science study project that was jointly sponsored by the University of Minnesota Informatics Institute and the Institute for Advanced Study for the 2016 cohort of Human in the Data fellows, who participated in lightning talks and table discussions, developing “10 Questions for Critical Data Studies.” Click through to Youtube for the full schedule of presenters.