#untoa17

[librarianrafia]

No one would blame you for missing the early January introduction of two identical bills known as H.R. 482 and S.103. Sponsored by Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, both bills held the distinctly unremarkable title of the “Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017.” ...But many American geography and mapping professionals as well as fair housing advocates and academic researchers, are sitting up and paying attention. That’s because these bills include language that would actively prevent federal funds from being used to create and maintain geospatial databases covering affordable housing access and racial disparities—cutting off a key source of accessible and easy-to-use information for researchers and communities. (Geospatial data is data that’s associated with a particular geographic location). ....Here’s the language that concerns mapmakers, academics, housing advocates, and many others, taken directly from H.R. 482: "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no Federal funds may be used to design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a Federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing." ....There’s another possible rationale behind these bills: If you don’t collect data on a certain problem, it makes it easier to deny a problem exists at all. “I can’t find a reason for this bill other than to make all these other issues go away,” says Jack Giesking, a cultural geographer and assistant professor at Trinity College in Connecticut. “If you don’t have the data, you can’t prove it. I’ve heard people say ‘it’s not about the data.’ And I agree: It’s not about data, it’s about the fight for justice this supports. And housing and race are linked.” ...This isn’t purely an American phenomenon, either. France likes to view itself as a country with minimal issues with racism and discrimination. It’s hard to contradict this image because the collection of data on race or ethnicity has been illegal in France since 1978.

In the Age of Trump, We Need to Protect Map Databases

Access to information is under threat like never before.

By Faine Greenwood

[librarianrafia]

How does the treatment of humanities data differ from science data?" -It’s an interesting sort of tension, because in the sciences a lot of the conversation around documentation focuses on the notion of reproducibility in research. But that sort of paradigm doesn’t always map to the humanities. One of [the researchers at UCSB] brought up the notion of repeatability. It’s not necessarily that another researcher should be able to reproduce your exact results, but that whatever you’re describing, someone else should be able to do that [via their own path]. So it’s helping [researchers] understand how to document their process, the transformations, communicate the choices that they’ve made in manipulating the data or creating a certain type of resource so it’s understandable by other people, and helping them weigh some of the factors that might affect their argument. An additional component is considering what needs to be done to make that data continue to have value after a particular project. It’s a natural line from the documentation angle to discussion about metadata and file format sustainability, and selection of repositories that provide persistent access.

Thomas Padilla, UCSB’s Inaugural Humanities Data Curator

By Lisa Peet

[librarianrafia]

Why is this [The Counted site by the Guardian] necessary? The US government has no comprehensive record of the number of people killed by law enforcement. This lack of basic data has been glaring amid the protests, riots and worldwide debate set in motion by the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Before stepping down as US attorney general in April 2015, Eric Holder described the prevailing situation on data collection as “unacceptable”. The Guardian agrees with those analysts, campaign groups, activists and authorities who argue that such accounting is a prerequisite for an informed public discussion about the use of force by police. How does the US government count killings by police now? The FBI runs a voluntary program through which law enforcement agencies may or may not choose to submit their annual count of “justifiable homicides”, which it defines as “the killing of a felon in the line of duty”. This system is arguably less valuable than having no system at all: fluctuations in the number of agencies choosing to report figures, plus faulty reporting by agencies that do report, have resulted in partially informed news coverage pointing misleadingly to trends that may or may not exist. “We lack the ability right now to comprehensively track the number of incidents. ... Fixing this is an idea that we should all be able to unite behind.” –Eric Holder

The Counted

People killed by police in the US

[librarianrafia]

Elsevier denies it will force SSRN users on to other services

Purchase of research repository has horrified open access advocates who fear acquisition marks attempt to maintain control over publishing

[librarianrafia]

In the aftermath of the Great Depression, the U.S. government set out to evaluate the riskiness of mortgages — and left behind a stunning portrait of the racism and discrimination that has shaped American housing policy. Now a new digital tool makes it easier than ever to see that history in high-resolution. The project features the infamous redlining maps from the Home Owners' Loan Corporation. In the late 1930s, the HOLC "graded" neighborhoods into four categories, based in large part on their racial makeup. Neighborhoods with minority occupants were marked in red — hence "redlining — and considered high-risk for mortgage lenders.

Interactive Redlining Map Zooms In On America's History Of Discrimination

October 19, 20163:22 PM ET

CAMILA DOMONOSKE

[librarianrafia]

What’s a Data Curator To Do? Looking just beyond the (valid, important) tasks of preservation and basic access that are currently occupying many academic libraries entering the realm of data curation, interesting additional possibilities emerge for constructing what the work of data curation can be. I’m particularly interested right now in work that data curators can do to build secondary and tertiary resources—reference materials, if you will—around data. I mean particularly reference materials that draw on the skills of people with training in library and information science, things like indexes. These types of organized systems of description can be one way to provide additional value over full text search (which, for many kinds of data sets, e.g., a table of numerical readings, is not particularly effective anyway).

What IS on the menu?

More work with NYPL's open data, Part One

Trevor Muñoz 

[librarianrafia]

Working with data also involves ethical issues. What sorts of challenges have you come across in your work?" -Trying to help researchers work through what might happen when they decide to clean data in a certain type of way—for example, in the push toward a certain type of visualization or representation, how they might maintain the diversity that’s represented in the data while still reaching their end goal. I immerse myself in what those issues might be, and how they square with certain types of questions that a scholar might want to ask. Then I help them through the process of identifying those challenges. The other component of the ethical argument [is]related to potentially capturing information that is questionable, whether or not you have the right to capture and share it at will—trying to explore those questions and bring them to the fore. Some of those are teaching opportunities [such as] Twitter content—an exploded view, a conversation about all the different data that’s represented in each tweet in addition to the 140 characters: geolocation, relationship networks among different actors, things like that. I’d like to make more immediately transparent and identifiable all the labor that goes into the creation of digital library collections, or datasets that are used by digital humanists in their research. That’s more of an ethics tied to labor—trying to recover that and acknowledge it. Because it’s a lot of work, and it’s a significant intellectual contribution that can go unnoticed.

Thomas Padilla, UCSB’s Inaugural Humanities Data Curator

By Lisa Peet

[librarianrafia]

Open cultural data is related to Linked Data (or Linked Open Data) but while Linked Data requires specific technical protocols to support connections in the ‘web of data’, open cultural data could be as simple as publishing a downloadable text file. Discussion of linked data and its precursor, the Semantic Web, often assumed that data would be openly available. ...Possible reasons for the under-use of open cultural data include confusing or incompatible licenses, poor or inconsistent record quality within datasets, a lack of images or interesting descriptions, and undocumented or ambiguous vocabularies.

Where next for open cultural data in museums?

Mia Ridge