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In: Mario Khreiche
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The Political Economy of Education Technology The trend towards a greater presence of digital platforms in higher education has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite ongoing growing pains, remote learning tools have enabled many institutions to remain operational. The more or less seamless transition to virtual classrooms is largely owed to the ubiquitous use of Learning Management Systems (LMS), which have evolved from basic teaching support to robust infrastructures. According to estimates, already before the pandemic 99% of colleges and universities had integrated school-wide LMS while 85% of instructors had used LMS in class, whether in-person or distance learning, synchronous or asynchronous content. By the end of 2019, Instructure Canvas alone registered nearly 20 million enrollees in colleges and universities. As the LMS market saturates and new LMS adoptions decline, companies compete by promising advances in the areas of interoperability, customization, analytics, and design. The pandemic emergency clearly illustrated, for instance, the importance of seamless integration between video conferencing platforms and LMS. But instead of simply enabling remote learning, new education technology (EdTech) reimagines the pedagogic environment, extends performance metrics into virtual classrooms, and reshapes modes of participation and academic labor. For an already growing EdTech industry the pandemic turned out to be an exceptional boon. Against the backdrop of an estimated $76.4 billion market size in 2019, that is before the pandemic, analysts projected “a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.1% from 2020 to 2027”. But already the first three months in 2020 account for $3 billion of “global EdTech Venture Capital, nearly 10% Read More

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In: Annette Vee
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The English language is a tough one to master. It’s a language full of contradictions, exceptions to seemingly nonsensical rules, and confusing homophones. English Compositionists have spent decades studying how we learn to read and write it, and for most of that time, studies have focused on the language itself; using pens, pencils, and paper—or even a typewriter—little else would likely interfere with or distract from a basic writer’s journey toward mastery. Our April 5, 2021 guest on the podcast, Dr. Annette Vee, studies how writing, and the entire concept of literacy, has changed since the proliferation of digital technologies. For a student to be considered “literate” in an English Composition today, they must not only master the ins and outs of English itself—the minutia of commas, i-before-e, their/there/they’re—but also the computer or device they use to compose: the administrative and participatory tasks of their class’ Learning Management System, their word processing application, the host they send and read class-related emails through, and so much more. And as Dr. Vee points out, a student or employee who pursues a career that uses computers might also be required to learn a programing language before they are considered truly “literate” in the language of their professional world. A lot more goes into language-based literacy today than just words on a page. Dr. Vee is Associate Professor of English and Direction of the Composition Program here at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as a participant and Co-Leader of our Sawyer Seminar, originated in the fall of 2019 (And Read More

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In: Lara Putnam
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What does it really mean to do research in the digital age? We might have what seem like an easy set of answers: doing research means using Google, managing citations using organizational software like Zotero or Easy Bib, collecting and integrating quotations (we might use Endnote or Scrivener for this), accessing archives (some of which are physical, but most of which are not), and then presenting that research using a word processor. But again, what does this really mean, especially when we consider that for most of human history, research looked nothing like what I’ve just described? If a search engine does not exist, nor the Internet, neither do any of the ways we access information as it exists separately from geographic space and necessarily longer durations of time. Before such massive accumulations of digitized texts, a researcher would likely have to travel to a specific archival or fieldwork site to accrue knowledge that could only be gained in that specific way: driving to the airport, stepping on a plane, travelling to that location, and spending a significant amount of time there. But today, all of that time, money, and attention can be saved and spent on engaging with the text itself; fieldwork can be supplemented increasingly efficiently with Zoom, Skype, text and email. Our podcast guest on April 2, 2021, Dr. Lara Putnam, chatted with me about exactly how these profound and rapid changes in research methods impact our daily lives, and how we think about the world around us. Dr. Puntam is UCIS Research Read More

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In: Chris Gilliard
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The history of surveillance in the United States is a long one. Our guest for the podcast on March 31, 2021, Dr. Chris Gillard, studies this very fact; Dr. Gillard’s scholarship focuses on digital privacy, institutional tech policy, surveillance capitalism, and digital redlining—a term that he defined on the podcast as “the creation and maintenance of tech practices, policies, pedagogies, and investment decisions that enforce class boundaries and discriminate against marginalized group.” As many of our Seminar guests have attested, too, access and relationships to contemporary digital technologies falls along racial, gendered, and classed lines, and the Internet—and the tools we use to access it—are made overwhelming by and for wealthy, straight white men in urban environments. And as Dr. Gilliard points out, access to the Internet is not the only thing historically minoritized groups are robbed of; these groups are also overwhelmingly stripped of their autonomy and privacy online. Although worries about CCTV and post-Patriot Act wiretapping seem especially twenty-first century, eminent scholars have recently illustrated how the very foundation of our nation, including its formation of racial and class differences, depended on the institution of surveillance. In her groundbreaking Dark Matters: On The Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne makes clear the connections between “the Panopticon, captivity, the slave ship, plantation slavery, racism, and the contemporary carceral practices of the U.S. prison system,” illustrating how contemporary surveillance technologies of all kinds have been formed and informed by the U.S.’s methods of policing and categorizing Black life under slavery (Browne pg. 43). This is evident all Read More

A 19th Century Doctor's Visit

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In: Christopher Phillips
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Dr. Christopher Phillips on the Histories of Statistics & Data in Medicine On March 17, our podcast hosted Dr. Christopher Phillips, a Professor and Historian of science, medicine, and statistics Carnegie Mellon University—and also a member of our Seminar! Beginning in the Fall of 2019, Dr. Phillips joined in on our public events and Friday lunchtime sessions. On our podcast interview, he shared how joining the Seminar’s interdisciplinary conversations about data and (reference intended!) information ecosystems has revealed the need for and rewards of approaching the same topics from distinct disciplinary and methodological viewpoints. And during our chat, I was alerted over and over to how valuable a historic approach to understanding science is. So often, we view STEM fields and workplaces as intrinsically separate from, and thus competing against, the humanities. This perceived divide has real-world consequences, among them the myths of STEM disciplines as ahistorical or apolitical, and the ultimately dangerous devaluing and underfunding of humanities programs. But Dr. Phillips’ work stands as a testament to the very real insights to be gained from a historical approach to math, science, statistics, and medicine. His current research focuses on the long histories of precision medicine and statistical approaches within. In the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the concept of precision medicine has come under renewed scrutiny. Precision medicine proposes that medical practices ranging from decisions, diagnoses, treatments, and products can be tailored to precise subgroups of patients—taking into account their genetics, environment, and lifestyle, rather than a “one size fits all” approach. For many Read More

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In: Uncategorized
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When you read the phrase “Augmented Reality,” your mind might turn to something like Pokémon GO or the popular running app, Zombies, Run! In both cases, the user experiences a game that, while based in a real-world environment, includes computer-generated perceptual information—most typically visuals and sounds, but including haptic modalities, too. A Pokémon, GO player might make their way down a very real hiking trail or across a downtown street while their phones display that very same location—the only difference being a virtual Growlithe waiting to be captured atop a tree stump or storm drain. Augmented Reality is a term that’s been in the mainstream public consciousness for decades now; for example, AR in the form of what’s known as Heads Up Display (HUD), which allows airplane pilots to read information on a clear glass screen atop the windshield itself (rather than a separate display), has been standard in aviation for decades now. But only very recently, alongside the rise of smartphones and Artificial Intelligence, has the true potentiality of AR become a mainstream, everyday reality—allowing it to flourish most popularly in entertainment, fitness, and marketing and commerce. Pokémon GO and Zombies, Run! have been around since 2016 and 2012 respectively, and in that time a whole world of Augmented Reality experiences have popped up. Alongside the video games and fitness experiences, there’s the Warby Parker app that allows users to virtually try on glasses, an IKEA app that places virtual furniture into users’ homes, and Snapchat filters that turned a Footlocker advertisement into a 3D Read More

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Happy Black History Month! The Seminar does not have any scheduled guests or podcasts so far this month, and so an opportunity arises to highlight voices & publications beyond our venerable (& growing!) list of participants. During this strange & stressful February, I wanted to make space, as SE (Shack) Hackney did last year, within Information Ecosystems to highlight some incredible and essential work by and about Black voices, and—amid a global pandemic—how race overlaps with medicine, data, and concepts of cure. What follows is an absolutely non-exhaustive reading list on topics of Blackness, medicine, data, and technology. I offer these pieces & voices as profoundly important to how we should be thinking about medicine and technology within our current moment; it is difficult to understate the debt we all owe to Black scholars, activists, scientists, doctors, and organizers, particularly in digitally-oriented spaces—but lending an eye or ear to their essential contributions is a start. And indeed, as the long shadow of COVID-19 extends toward its year-long mark, we must take seriously the disproportionally devastating impact the pandemic has had on our nation’s Black communities. Today, while the rate of hospitalization and death per 10,000 sits at 7.4 and 2.3 for white patients, it is a staggering 24.6 and 5.6 for Black patients (source). Scholars from a wide array of disciplines have over and over confirmed that the U.S. has a long and difficult history of racism in medicine. And, as our own Seminar guests—such as Dr. Safiya Noble and Dr. Sandra González-Bailón—have also confirmed, the Read More

Cartogram of the 2008 US Presidential Election results

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In: Bill Rankin
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On Friday, December 4, The University of Pittsburgh’s Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) from the Quantitative to the Digital Age was joined by Bill Rankin, an Associate Professor of the History of Science at Yale University. Professor Rankin’s research focuses on the relationship between science and mapping, the environmental sciences and technology, architecture and urbanism, in addition to methodological problems of digital scholarship, spatial history, and geographic analysis. His prize-winning first book, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016. Professor Rankin is also an award-winning cartographer, and his maps have been published and exhibited widely in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Rankin talked with the Sawyer Seminar Participants, who are faculty and students at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University, about cartography, election mapping, and the contemporary U.S. political landscape. Amid the many reactions to and characterizations of the historic 2020 Presidential election, this meeting helped the Seminar participants understand how and why election mapping continues to play an increasingly crucial role in the electoral process; in particular, Rankin’s talk touched generatively about the concept of “purple states” or “purple places.” Purple has been, in recent years, offered as a more representative complication to the simple binarism of “blue,” or liberal, and “red,” or conservative states. The “red” versus “blue” state discourse began as a simple, visual way for newscasters to characterize a state’s partisan tendencies over long durations of time. And while we do Read More

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In: Melissa Finucane
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After a half-year intermission, on Friday, Nov. 13, the University of Pittsburgh’s Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) from the Quantitative to the Digital Age welcomed Melissa L. Finucane, senior social and behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation in Pittsburgh. With a portfolio of work that includes studying human reaction to climate change and other disasters, such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Finucane is interested in how people perceive risk, and her discussion of “use-inspired science” in that context seemed especially relevant amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Finucane helped the participants of the Sawyer Seminar, who are faculty and students at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University, to rethink the purpose of data’s creation. In this case, Finucane is interested in use-inspired science, which encourages input from communities and stakeholders when formulating research questions. Orienting research toward use-inspired science, Finucane explained, comes with thinking through research questions and outputs that can provide help to a specific population, whether that it’s in a context of policymaking or in responding to the needs of a community affected by disaster. Finucane’s work with the Consortium for Resilient Gulf Communities (CRGC) on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill fits that bill. The idea behind the CRGC is to find ways to build community resilience in the areas affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The consortium’s work is broken up into four interconnected activities: 1) respond to issues identified within the community; 2) support the community by engaging in dialogue and education; 3) generate data and ideas to Read More

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In: Richard Marciano
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On November 1, Dr. Richard Marciano, a professor at the University of Maryland, asked Sawyer Seminar participants, “If you were on an academic desert island, what data would you bring with you?” After hearing about his career, which included working as a computational environmental scientist and at a supercomputing center, studying electrical engineering, and most recently, working as a professor and director of data curation initiatives at UMD, it was clear that Dr. Marciano has had to make decisions like this one numerous times. He discussed moving between jobs or even universities and bringing relevant data sets and sources with him into these roles. Consequently, he lends a fascinating perspective to data curation and records management, as well as pedagogy in these fields. Dr. Marciano first came to UMD when they were seeking professors to transform their Masters in Library and Information Science program and change the way students were trained in digital and computational methods. To balance the fact that he comes from a science background, he intentionally built teams with members from archival and library backgrounds. One of the courses he introduced was an eight-week intensive program across disciplines that uses digital methods to work through data problems. In teaching, he uses tools like Jupyter notebooks to create readable, touchable, interactive environments and learning spaces that others can build upon. In addition, he suggests universities create certificate programs for continuing education in digital methods for humanities and archival professions to keep up with current trends. For example, major curators of data like the National Read More