Research Projects

I collaborate with a number of people on long-term research, performance, and installation projects. A short description of each project can be found below and if you click on the project you’ll find a longer discussion of the work.

A Bibl for Spreadsheets (History and Cultures of/related to…will update with new materials soon 10/2020)

[1] Lazar Raković, et al “Spreadsheets: How It Started” Accessed: Aug. 15, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lazar_Rakovic/publication/280096970_Spreadsheets_-How_It_Started/links/55a8e7b108aea3d0867db6ad.pdf. [2] M. Friendly, “A Brief History of Data Visualization,” in Handbook of Data Visualization, C. Chen, W. Härdle, and A. Unwin, Eds. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2008, pp. 15–56. [3] “A Brief History of Decision Support Systems.” http://dssresources.com/history/dsshistoryv28.html (accessed Aug. 15, 2020). [4] D. J. Power, “A History of Microcomputer Spreadsheets,” Communications of the Association […]

Ways of sitting with loss…

I study the way we count dead people. I also make art in order to help people experience mass casualty events differently. Usually this is about the past. For the last several years I’ve been interested in mourning braids, a tradition that has some roots in Victorian England, but also more contemporary examples like the stunning work of Nene Humphrey. I recognized last week, during our first week of “social […]

WoundPerson

This is a project to help you visualize how much & what kind of data you are sharing when you use a wearable and/or implantable device. While self-tracking can be/can seem benign, the third-party collection and sharing of gathered data puts you at risk once data leaves your control. This is the first public iteration for WoundPerson and we would love your thoughts and reactions. Email: send your thought to us […]

Center for Solutions to Online Violence

According to a recent Pew Study, 1 in 4 women have experienced online stalking or sexual harassment. Labeled as “social justice warriors,” prominent journalists, media makers, and bloggers have been harassed and threatened for writing about economic inequality, education, and racism in popular culture. The culture of fear that is being created impacts not just professionals, but more perniciously, young women and men who are developing their habits and protocols […]

Park Central Mall

The site of Phoenix’s first shopping mall, Park Central Mall is undergoing renovations to revitalize and return the property to its stature as a hub for community gathering. During the preparations for renovations 20 volumes of clippings were found in the mall basement, some from as early as the 1950s ground breaking of the mall. These are the basis of a new Nexus Co-operative project to preserve and share the stories of […]

Border Quants

Border Quants is a collective of artists and scholars conducting research related to digital human rights, personal data protection, and decolonial approaches to data use. The collaborating artists and scholars include Jessica Rajko (ASU), Marisa Elena Duarte (ASU), Jacqueline Wernimont (ASU), Patricia Garcia (Michigan), Heather Ross (ASU), and Marika Cifor (Bowdin). Our motivating questions include: What is the long history of uses of data with regard to cycles of oppression and discrimination? […]

HASTAC

I began working as HASTAC Co-Director mid-2017 and it’s been a fantastic journey so far. HASTAC is a free, open social network for scholars, artists, and makers interested in the ways that humanities, arts, science, and technology fields can productively overlap. In our proposal, we noted that at ASU we measure our success by whom we include and how they succeed. Our new HASTAC-ASU partnership is similarly guided by an […]

Counting The Dead: Arizona and the Forgotten Pandemic

“Counting the Dead in the Forgotten Epidemic” is a series of archival projects, multimedia installations, and public events that focus on the 1918 Influenza pandemic. In each of the series, my team and I work to recover a full account of influenza mortalities in a particular locality. We then take that archival work and re-embody the quantitative and qualitative data in a mixed-media installation that encourages people to sit with […]

Eugenic Rubicon

Many people are surprised to learn that in the 20th century over 60,000 people in the United States, mainly patients in state asylums and hospitals, were sterilized based on eugenics laws. A number of excellent books and articles and a few web resources on the history of eugenics and sterilization have appeared in recent years, but very little known is about the demographics and experiences of people sterilized, often against their […]

The Living Net

What happens when we think of data “not only as accumulation of cultural material” but also as a something that “lives and operates within a culture by its actions?”[1] This is a question that motivates my work in both the history of data and quantification and cultural analysis of contemporary data cultures. Over the last 300 years we’ve seen the institutionalization of forms, metrics, and, most recently, digital work across […]