Data Projects Showcase
Data Projects Showcase
Tony Aponte is the Team Leader of the UCLA Science and Engineering Library (SEL) and an engineering subject librarian. He provides instruction to students about being informed and effective consumers and producers of information, and coordinates collection development at SEL. He is also a member of the library’s Data Management Group which provides research data services including guidance and consultations for planning, managing, organizing, describing, and sharing research data. Twitter: @tjaponte
Learn how to use open data repositories and portals to find open datasets and also publish your research data. Depositing your data in an open repository can facilitate discovery, preservation, and proper citation or credit.
Allison Fischer-Olson, M.A. was born and raised in Los Angeles. Allison’s current work revolves around community centered collaboration in museum and archival spaces, as well as more broadly in cultural heritage. Outside of being a project manager for the MILA project, Allison currently works in the Archaeology Collections Facility at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, specifically on repatriation issues, collections research, and general curation support. She also works for Rainbow Bridge Monument Valley Expedition Onward!, a non-profit organization working to create a large scale, multi-institutional exhibition in both digital and museum spaces about an archaeological expedition that took place in the 1930’s.
Following indigenous protocols of recognizing the original inhabitants of Los Angeles, we acknowledge the Gabrielino/Tongva (Tongva) on whose lands we live as we put together this website. Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles aims to uncover and highlight the multiple layers of indigenous Los Angeles through a storymapping project with youth, community leaders, and elders from indigenous communities throughout the city. The dissemination of our collaborative research involves developing a website that makes visible the rich Indigenous identities and histories that are often hidden within other racial formations yet deeply embedded in the history of Los Angeles. Not only are indigenous communities often obscured by the complexities of racial labels and multiple migrations, our communities are often invisible to each other. Indigenous knowledge about Los Angeles imparts significant understandings of history, place, culture and the environment– in essence rooting our knowledge of Los Angeles in the rich and multiple notions of place created by indigenous peoples.
Hannah Gustafson is a GIS Data Analyst with the California Center for Sustainable Communities (@CCSCatUCLA) in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. At CCSC, she helps develop the LA Energy Atlas, an online tool for visualizing and analyzing energy consumption patterns throughout the Los Angeles region. She recently graduated from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs with a Master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning where she focused on identifying high potential zero net energy building types in Los Angeles County.
The Energy Atlas (www.energyatlas.ucla.edu) is an interactive web Atlas that provides decision-makers, researchers and the public with access to the largest and most disaggregated building energy data available in the nation. Powered by a geospatial relational database that connects address level energy consumption to building characteristics and census information, the tool can be used to inform energy planning and research in Los Angeles and throughout California as the State works to achieve its ambitious energy goals, and as local regions work to create energy sustainability.
Albert Kochaphum graduated from UCLA with a Master's of Urban and Regional Planning in 2014 and works in the Institute for Digital Research and Education as the Assistant Campus GIS Coordinator. Kochaphum has worked on a wide range of projects with staff and faculty ranging from Historical Africa Maps, the Play the LA River project, and accessibility mapping. Mr. Kochaphum will demonstrate how to utilize Los Angeles's Open Data repository (https://data.lacity.org/) for analysis using software such as ArcGIS, Excel, etc.
Lisa McAulay is the Interim Head of the UCLA Digital Library Program and directs the development of collections, services, and technology related to digital library projects in the UCLA Library. McAulay has worked for the UCLA Library for nearly nine years, including on the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, metadata workflows, the Seeing Sunset: Learning Los Angeles Platform, and a wide range of additional projects. The Digital Library's collections are available at http://digital.library.ucla.edu/.
Irene Pasquetto is a PhD student in Information Studies at UCLA. As a social researcher at the UCLA Center for Knowledge Infrastructures, Pasquetto investigates questions of data access and openness in multi-disciplinary contexts. Her background is in Media Studies and tech journalism. Learn more about her work at http://irenepasquetto.com/ and follow her on Twitter @irenepasquetto.
Ms. Pasquetto will present the POIH Project, which explores un- and under-reported incidents of police officer involved (POI) homicides, both justified and unjustified. To fill gaps found in existing government and local databases pertaining to POI homicides, Pasquetto and her research team deploy participatory action research methods through community involvement in mining and analyzing social media data related to these incidents. Through these methods, social media information operates in concert with publicly available government and local databases to create a clearer representation of the lived realities of communities experiencing police homicides in the United States. Los Angeles County is their first community of study. http://www.poihomicides.org/
Erik Porse is a postdoctoral scholar in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. He focuses on urban sustainability for water and energy in L.A., bridging history, policy, engineering, and modeling, with a particular interest in data structures that support visualization of complex systems. He can be found online at http://www.researchcp.com and @researchcp. Dr. Porse will present on the LA Water Atlas, a project in development, and modeled on the LA Energy Atlas that colleagues Stephanie Pincetl and Hannah Gustafson will also discuss.
Andy Rutkowski is the current Geospatial Resources Librarian at UCLA Libraries and the former Interdisciplinary GIS Library Fellow at USC Libraries. He is working on an ongoing web-based mapping project using collections from the ONE Archives. His project takes the Damron Guide as a starting point to mapping out archival material and building a narrative around those materials.
Cynthia Wang is a PhD Candidate at USC in the Annenberg School of Communication. She was a recipient of USC’s Diploma in Innovation grant from 2013-2014, which allowed her to create GlobaltraQs, a web-based application that maps out LGBTQ stories throughout history around the world.
Rutkowski and Wang will present ongoing projects that focus on LGBTQ communities and the role that space, place, and location take in individual and collective lived experiences. We will discuss how telling stories that emphasize place begin to bridge the gap between analog and digital environments, historical and current collections, and local and global communities. Because of the perpetual invisibility of queer communities, storytelling empowers individuals to participate in larger, interconnected conversations, revealing hidden histories and neglected narratives. Queer stories are everywhere. By mapping them out across space and time, we are able to better understand how they connect local cultures to a growing global community. See more about their work at http://one.usc.edu/mapping-queer-terrains/
Brett Shears is active in Los Angeles politics, serving in many capacities within the neighborhood council system and as unofficial adviser to many city officials. His work on open data began with USC's Center on Communication Leadership & Policy and continues today with Open Data LA and Civic Tech USC, each of which recently published reports on open data efforts in Los Angeles. Mr. Shears will discuss Open Data LA's Phase 1 report that analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of current open data ratings systems such as the U.S. City Open Data Census and the CALPIRG financial transparency scores. Find Mr. Shears @BrettShears on Twitter or at Facebook.com/brett.shears
Ariel Levi Simons is a science educator and researcher involved in citizen science and outreach projects, primarily in the Los Angeles area. He currently teaches at Loyola Marymount University and coordinates the science program for the University of Southern California's Neighborhood Academic Initiative. Follow @levisimons on Twitter, and find out more about his work at http://scienceland.wikispaces.com and http://foxtronicsla.com/articles/
Mr. Simons will share his experience in citizen data collection and science projects. Over the summer of 2014 a group of high school students, working in conjunction with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the University of Southern California, set up a water quality monitoring network along a 30 mile stretch of the Los Angeles River. In part motivated by the proposal to remove the concrete lining along the Glendale narrows section of the river, students repeatedly took chemical and microbiological samples at eight sites to get a snapshot of the conditions in the river before any major restoration work commenced. This project is an illustration of the type of environmental data capture and analysis which can be run at the community level.