Hi sorry this is massively late, I did not read the instructions carefully enough clearly!

My project for ITP is going to be primarily focusing on science communication and science literacy: how can we make science accessible to all populations? One of the big questions I have had since COVID-19 hit was “how are people denying the science? How is this becoming political? How are people I thought were so smart not following the experts?” I think I found part of the answer during my literature review. When people hear new information, they accept or deny it based on how they perceive it to fit into their belief system and their community’s belief system. It doesn’t matter how “well educated” someone is, because it’s not about intelligence at all, it’s about fitting into your community. The only way to effectively communicate science is to have a diverse team of science communicators and to encourage people to look at data/ideas from different perspectives, and use that to confront their own perspectives.

The Collective Fabric is a project I have been working on for about 7 months. I spoke at a symposium last Saturday at the Civic Art Lab to explain the progress. Essentially, we’ve completed a prototype within my research lab, where we created take-home kits containing agar plates (which grow bacteria), cotton swabs, and instructions on how to plate their microbiome (the community of colonizers living on your skin, in your mouth, in your gut). We also asked them to answer questions of stillness in response to their life changes since the pandemic: what is something that has surprised you? What is something that has challenged you? What is something you miss? From here, we took the images of the grown bacterial plates and generated digital collective fabrics, using the answers to this questions as the thread to pull the plates together. There are three members of my team, one undergraduate Hunter student from Queens, and a African-born Dutch artist who works in residence in my lab. Each of us constructed our own fabric, touching on concepts of the essential role that diversity plays in our microbiomes and in our society, how data is biased by the person interpreting, and how discussing how people answer questions differently gives space for us to confront our own perspectives and question oru belief systems.

This project hits a lot of the goals I have grown to have throughout ITP. For my project, I would like to turn the Collective Fabric into an educational opportunity, focusing on young children (possible within Hunter College’s early education schools). I think the process of streaking bacterial plates helps people become comfortable with scientific concepts in their everyday life, building trust in scientists, and the process of discussion allows them to get comfortable talking about our differences and celebrating them, understanding how we’ve been affected differently, and systems in place that causes those differences. I have to do more work to decide exactly which concepts would be best for different age groups, and then decide which group would be best to focus on. Overall, I think I have a base prototype that I could adapt to a digital humanity project, creating a website to document these fabrics, answers to these questions, and watching bacterial growth.

All of my potential project ideas have centered around fostering more interactivity between the history discipline and technology. In leveraging these tools’ power, the profession can continue the field’s storytelling aspect in ways that will reach audiences that are more likely to gain information from interactive technology than the more traditional learning methods. The generational divide in learning practices often creates a barrier to innovation. Traditional methods once popular for their teaching effectiveness must evolve to teach the first generation of students who have not lived in a world without the internet. 

The project idea has undergone several build design. The project is currently centered on leveraging data visualization’s power to tell a heavy data story that individuals can interact with. At a minimum, a cleaned data set that could be used by any would be ideal. The difficulty in projects such as these is trying to find a properly formatted set of data. My MVP (Minimum Viable Project) would be obtaining, formatting, and using the data to demonstrate that technology is not the bain of storytelling. Hopefully, the site can be used by others augmenting the data set to generate a digital repository of archival material that exists in a useable format. 

This link directs you to a site made by Robert Darnton, one of the great historians on the book trade, particularly in France. I first came across this site five years ago during my undergraduate Intro to History Writing course. I was impressed at the presentation of sources and facts. It seemed that this was a far better way to present information than in a paper format. True, it was more labor-intensive, but it did allow the user to navigate through the story in their way. The map is of particular interest as clicking on each town will give you information about that particular location. Robert Darnton said it best when explaining his rationale for the website, “I have accumulated so much information during nearly a half-century that I might overwhelm my readers with details or bore them to death. It cannot be compressed within the covers of a printed book. Therefore, with the help of research assistants and professional technicians, I am presenting it on this open-access.” I do not have the encyclopedic knowledge on any subject that Darnton has brought to bear. What I do have is an idea inspired by this work. To create a site where data is gathered and presented so that any individual who wants to can add or interact in a collaborative process. My project aims to generate the first, of what I hope is many, contributions that can harness technology in an egalitarian intellectual way.