StudyComponents_LP


 * // How have different ways of thinking about the structure and function of digital information infrastructure shaped what the digital information infrastructure has become? //**

I will focus on the Semantic Web development community as a field site. First, I will conduct interviews with individuals that have been instrumental to the development of the Semantic Web. Since part of my research is interested in how legacy thought styles (from information science, computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and philosophy) shape the way researchers think about information infrastructure, a large part of these interviews will involve inquiry about personal and professional history: How did you get involved in conceptualizing, designing, and engineering the Semantic Web?

I will go on to conduct a discourse analysis of the public email archives documenting the development of the Semantic Web technologies such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Through initial scans, I can see that these archives are wrought with debates over how the relationships between data points should be formalized into code. I will juxtapose these debates with the legacy thought styles that I trace in my interviews in order to get a better sense of where, in the ontology, they become embedded.


 * // What data challenges do information infrastructures respond to? // and // What makes environmental justice data so difficult to recognize? //**

I will hone on in the EPA’s data infrastructure, considering how existing data practices characterize environmental justice communities and how the EPA perceives the opportunities of Semantic Web infrastructure. I will analyze the EPA’s current efforts to bring environmental justice issues to the fore, investigating what types of data they are leveraging, how data standards from diverse sources are being negotiated, and how visualizations and publications go on to portray data. I will do this by first characterizing existing EPA environmental justice mapping tools, such as EJSCREEN and EPA-authored reports on environmental justice. I will then trace the data in these tools and reports back towards their origin, noting how current EPA data infrastructures enable the linking of data from diverse sources. Next, I will conduct interviews with individuals in charge of data infrastructure at the EPA, getting a sense of how they perceive the key opportunities and challenges of engaging with Semantic Web infrastructure.


 * // How does the design of the Semantic Web shape what is permitted to become knowledge? //**

With help from //The Asthma Files// research team, I will identify case studies of environmental justice communities that have gone undocumented due to poor data infrastructure. I will analyze these case studies against the affordances of the Semantic Web to consider how this infrastructure could characterize such communities and how it could eclipse them. I will get a sense of the types of information needed to bring such communities to the fore from //The Asthma Files// research team, who will be working closely with the communities the research will address. I will also use strategies developed by feminist semioticians for reading “against the grain” (de Lauretis 1984) and “at the limit” (Cornell 1992) to expose how these communities have the potential to be written out of visibility through information infrastructures. (See Section III.A. paragraph 5 for an example of what this analysis may entail.) [LP1]

[LP1] Identify this as a methodological innnovation