Contributions_LP


 * Empirical**

In focusing on the // infrastructure // that organizes information about people, communities, the environment, and social problems, this research will also open a new line of inquiry in scholarship on big data. Rather than looking at one aspect of the big data process – such as collection, processing, and visualization – this research will look at the structures for organizing information that traverse through big data analysis.

Also the literature on the history of AI has tended to homogenize thought styles in the field of AI. I want to show that these thought styles are diverse - especially that they are marked by several diverse philosophical commitments.

State of the field of research on environmental justice data infrastructures?? Don't know this literature well enough to characterize it yet.


 * Methodological**

Literature in feminist semiotics and language theory provides tools for reading a text for what’s not there – for how dominant forms of meaning-making shape information margins. This literature can thus open new paths for interrogation of information infrastructure. This research will leverage the strategies in feminist semiotics to "read" digital infrastructures/code - reading code for what it doesn't say. In particular, it will use strategies such as reading code for the binaries that it produces, displacing the center with the margin, reading for genre. [This is where I'm really struggling with my HASS]


 * Conceptual**

"embedded epistemic commitments" While emerging literatures are beginning to interrogate the politics and values of information infrastructure, few studies trace how different ways of thinking about meaning and information impact specific design decisions. This work will demonstrate how the diverse epistemic commitments of diverse research communities shape the design of information infrastructure and how these ways of thinking become embedded in the infrastructure itself.

"limits of knowledge representation"/"light structure" Bowker and Star suggest that categories and classifications have politics that can produce information margins. I want to go on to show, however, that this is not a problem that can be fixed by simply adding more categories or getting rid of them altogether. You need an ontology to organize information, yet ontology can never adequately capture what is Other to the system. In this sense, there are complicated limits to knowledge representation. The goal to is keep pushing structure to its limit.

"devious design" (not for HASS)


 * Broader**

As the EPA – an organization that communities rely on for disseminating information about social issues – prepares to adopt Semantic Web infrastructure, it is important that its constituents understand what the infrastructure affords and how it can eclipse information. This research will demonstrate how the Semantic Web shapes how environmental justice issues become knowable. This is particularly important at a time when serious environmental injustices are coming to the fore in marginalized communities too late to mitigate long-term effects. In pointing out where, in the infrastructure, data can get buried, the work outlined here will develop strategies for helping organizations to leverage the Semantic Web critically – with an eye towards its affordances and how they can be manipulated to bring relevant information to the fore.