Several people have contacted me in the last twenty four hours about a relatively new site called FamilyTreeNow.com. The site is one of a couple of large 3rd party data aggregators that are advertised as a way of finding genealogical information and/or locating lost friends. It all sounds great – “make finding family free!” – but it can be extremely dangerous for those who are subject to stalking or other […]
FemTechNet
Feminist Infrastructure as Metamorphic Infrastructure
I’m one of five women on a panel about Feminist Infrastructure at the Digital Humanities annual conference taking place now in Krakow, Poland. Due to other obligations, I’m here in the states, but my virtual presence will be manifest with little movie presentation. Related: not keen that this panel and so many others have been put on a “diversity” track, but happy everyone is there and doing the work. Creating […]
DataPLAY Debuts
FemTechNet’s signal/noise conference, held in Ann Arbor (MI) this weekend, hosted the debut of Vibrant Lives’ DataPLAY. Below is our playbill, which evokes early American playbills that were used to advertise formal theatrical events as well as technological experiences and new medical practices, like those at the World’s Fair or in smaller traveling techno-operas and shows. In many ways the bill and the notion of a debut suggests a polished performance […]
Help create a living network piece
I’ve been working lately with the Vibrant Lives team on performative, haptic approaches to understanding data. This first took the form of our Vibrant Lives performance this fall at ASU’s Fall Forward showcase. Since then, we’ve been playing around with lots of different modalities for engaging with data and we’ve been talking a lot – mostly amongst ourselves, but also with folks who have been attending HSCollab’s “Critical Conversations” lunchtime […]
DataPLAY
As part of the FemTechNet signal/noise conference this April in Ann Arbor, MI the Vibrant Lives team will be presenting DataPlay. Participants in the DataPLAY will engage with a set of interactive sculptures that we are currently developing that will offer a range of haptic engagements with data. Included in this will be the Vibrant app, which uses participant’s mobile phone data to produce touch-based (haptic) feedback. Infrasonic subwoofers placed within the […]
Addressing Antifeminist Violence Online: Work Narrative
Need 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 […]
Addressing Anti-Feminist Violence Online – beginnings
I’m delighted to announce here that the Digital Media and Learning Competition 5: The Trust Challenge has selected FemTechNet’s “Addressing Anti-Feminist Violence Online” for funding. This was a wonderfully collaborative effort that arose out conversations sparked by both GamerGate and the violences experienced in the summer of 2014 by female public intellectuals like Dr. Sarah Kendzior (which Eric Garland’s Urgent Dispatch from the Seat of White Privilege does a good […]
Build a better DH syllabus
Prompted by a discussion on twitter (ht to Whitney Trettien and Daniel Powell) today (2/18/2015) about the inexcusable absence of women’s work from DH syllabi, I’m creating a space for collecting resources (the initial set up is derived from the DHSI course on Feminist DH that I teach each year with Liz Losh – if you’re not on here, it’s not because I don’t know and love your work – […]
Addressing Anti-Feminist Violence Online
Too many people have regular and sustained experiences of violence, including efforts to shut down participation in work, civic engagement, and social interaction. Women and feminists have been targets for quite some time, but 2014 felt to me like a year in which the threats were particularly frequent and the injuries inflected acute. I’m not interested in promoting hurtful actions algorithmically or otherwise, so I’m not going to name or […]