December 1 marked the deadline for a second round of proposals for the Year of Data and Society Funding Opportunity. Awards have been made to a rich range of projects and activities: data-focused curriculum development, events throughout the University, community-focused workshops, an exhibit, and research that uses data for public good.
The deadline for the next round of funding is February 1. Applications must be submitted through Competition Space. A full list of funded projects is available on our website.
Second Round Funded Projects
Addressing Water Affordability and Governance Transparency in the Pittsburgh Region with Publicly Available Data
Marcela González Rivas (GSPIA), Caitlin Shroering (Pittsburgh Collaboratory for Water Outreach, Research, and Education, University of Pittsburgh Water Collaboratory)
This project will build an understanding of the elements and characteristics of “good” water governance. The research team will conduct interviews with key actors in the water sector, gathering data about how water activists, officials, industry representatives and researchers characterize good water governance. This data will complement insights gained through a detailed review of academic, human rights, and advocacy literature on water governance. In collaboration with Women for a Healthy Environment, the project team will produce “report cards” of the region’s water authorities and create distilled information about water governance that can be disseminated to community organizations. The program team will also share their findings of the interview data collection and their process of locating, requesting, and using publicly available data for water research at the Water Collaboratory’s “Water in a Changing World” lunch discussion series at Pitt.
Black Voices in Computing
Rosta Farzan, Janet Majekodunmi, Shailey P Gulrajani, Chelsea Morning Gunn, and Dmitriy Babichenko (School of Computing and Information)
The goal of this project is to address the important challenge of race, inequalities, and injustices in computing by developing an exhibit that highlights the voice of Black scholars in computing. Through a novel lens of an interactive exhibit, the project aims to address the challenge of race and injustices in the field of computing by (1) systematically collect data and document knowledge about Black scholars in the computing; (2) bringing attention to the significance of the contribution of the Black scholars in the field; (3) creating a public space to visibly communicate the importance of diversity to our community, and particularly to the under-represented members of our community; (4) by engaging undergraduate students from the underrepresented group in this research project, we aim to empower them in being influential members of the community, encourage them to pursue research and higher education in the field of computing.
Careers in Language Data: How to prepare our language students for the data-focused job future
Na-Rae Han and Dan Villarreal (Department of Linguistics)
This award will support a symposium titled “Careers in Language Data: How to prepare our language students for the data-focused job future.” Through this event, attendees will learn about the roles that language experts are increasingly playing in the technology industry. The event will present concrete paths for language majors and language departments in their pursuit of getting graduates ready for careers in the language data industry. Through the symposium, students and faculty will understand the data skills needed for this career preparation and provide a space for discussion about how curriculum and advising can support these data skills.
Complementing the Engineering Curriculum with Data for Social Good
Amin Rahimian (Swanson School of Engineering)
This project will support the development of instructional materials that will be delivered as an Engineering elective entitled “Data for Social Good”. The curriculum will engage students in a critical study of contemporary topics at the intersection of AI, data, and society including fairness, accountability, transparency, and privacy issues. Engineers broadly, and industrial engineers in particular, are often in positions to shape society through their designs. The curriculum will equip students with tools to think through the societal consequences of their designs and empower them to influence large-scale sociotechnical systems of the future. THe instructional materials will also be made available in an open repository for adaptation and adoption by other instructors within and outside of Engineering.
Curriculum for Introduction to Data Literacy for All Through Applications
Konstantinos Pelechrinis and Prashant Krishnamurthy (School of Computing and Information)
This project will produce an introductory data science curriculum that will be openly available and adaptable for integration in courses across the University. The curriculum will use engaging applications and fields, like movies, music, transportation, and sports, to build understandings of probability, uncertainty, causality, correlation, seasonality, and data-driven decision making. This curriculum development project will produce short modules that will introduce various data science/literacy concepts, with minimal to no pre-requisites. These modules will be available asynchronously online to the whole Pitt community. The team will also hold workshops throughout using a flipped classroom setting, where students that have watched the modules will come in and present/discuss/ask questions about the modules using their own application from their field of interest.
Data Journalism and Media Literacy Panel Discussion
Jamaica Jones, Emily Keith, Shalani Dilinika Jayamanne Mohottige, Sneha Vaidhyam (School of Computing and Information)
This award supports a panel discussion and reading group focused on the role of data across media and journalism ecosystems. The events will engage participants of all backgrounds in a generative exchange about misinformation, the role of the media as information gatekeepers, and the use of data as both a tool and a weapon in the age of online misinformation. The panel discussion and reading group will foster data literacy skills, encouraging participants to critically evaluate the data that we consume through online information environments.
DHRX Residency Program Seed Grant
Alison Langmead (Department of History of Art and Architecture and School of Computing and Information), Kate Joranson (University Library System), Chelsea Gunn (School of Computing and Information), and Annette Vee (Department of English)
The DHRX Residency Program Seed Grant project will design and instantiate a series of ongoing residencies that will serve as a structured opportunity to grow the offerings of the DHRX: Digital Humanities Research initiative and to increase university-wide understanding of, and engagement with, the role of computing and data in the interpretive disciplines. The funds will support planning sessions, facilitated by members of the Pitt community, resulting in a design document for the DHRX Residency Program. The project planning team will share plans for the DHRX Residency Program with a wider public in late Spring 2022, with an outward-facing colloquium hosted by the Humanities Center.
My Nature Outing
Stephen Quigley (Department of English), Cassie Quigley (School of Education), Hillary Henry (School of Education), and Holly Plank (School of Education)
My Nature Outing provides middle and high school students an ingress into environmental education and computer science. The program encourages students to first embed in nature while completing several multimodal documentation and data collection activities. During these activities, students test the affordances and constraints of different media for data collection, including photography, sound recording, and journaling. After a morning spent in the woods collecting data, students return to a classroom space where they work with code to develop a webtext that circulates their findings. The Year of Data and Society award will provide My Nature Outing with the tools and resources to support outings at eight different locations around Pittsburgh.
Open Scholarship and Research Impact Challenge
Helenmary Sheridan (Health Sciences Library System), Ryan Champagne (Office of Sponsored Programs), Dominic Bordelon (University Library System)
Open scholarship refers to the philosophy and practice of improving the reproducibility and rigor of research by sharing data, code, protocols, and results. The Open Scholarship and Research Impact Challenge will comprise a two-week calendar of events focused on giving researchers practical tools to make their research more accessible, more reproducible, more connected to the public welfare, and more in line with their personal values. Run by the Health Sciences Library System, the University Library System, and the Office of Sponsored Programs, this activity will result in the creation of readily available curriculum and teaching materials that can be reused in future programs and shared publicly for use at other institutions. It will serve as a new model for making an explicit connection between open scholarship and critical scholarly impact learning and practice.
PittPharmacy Global Health Day
Jennifer Chai (School of Pharmacy)
This award supports the PittPharmacy Global Health Day for students, faculty, and staff to promote awareness of how data, particularly in a global context, permeates our educational, governmental, health care systems, and other aspects of society. Through a keynote presentation and an interactive activity, the participants will be invited to think critically about the impact of data in global health (and global health pharmacy specifically) and encouraged to seek innovative, ethical and compassionate solutions to priority areas in global health.
Promoting Data Equality by Improving Open Government Data Users’ Data Literacy
Fanghui Xiao (School of Computing and Information), Daqing He (School of Computing and Information), and David Walker (University Center for Social and Urban Research)
Governments at all levels are sharing data about our communities through open government data (OGD) portals. However, not all members of the public have the data literacy skills that would support their use of this data, resulting in “data inequality.” Through user studies, this project will establish a comprehensive OGD literacy framework that will be used to facilitate data literacy workshop design and will inform the improvement of the interface design of data portal platforms to encourage more users to use OGD. The study will also provide a deliverable interactive OGD-literacy test tool for evaluating users' OGD-literacy. The ultimate goal of this project is to promote data equality.
Reclaiming Narratives Through Interdisciplinary Data Collection
Bridget Keown and Julie Beaulieu (Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program)
The Gender and Science Initiative, part of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program, is dedicated to educating students across all disciplines about equitable data collection and research practices, and to recovering narratives that have been lost to the historic record and gone under-considered in health, environmental, and social sciences. This project will be used to support speakers whose work exemplifies such liberatory work. Additionally, it will support programming that will welcome faculty and students from across the University to discuss and develop revolutionary research practices that challenge disciplinary boundaries and highlight overlooked individuals and groups in the past and present.
Super Analytics Challenge Focused on Food Security and Hunger
Christopher Barlow and Sandra Douglas (Katz Graduate School of Business)
The award will provide support to the 2022 Super Analytics Challenge, hosted by the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. This event connects Pitt students with partners in local nonprofits, government, and business and provides a challenge to explore through data analytics. This year, the Super Analytics Challenge will use data to build an understanding of food insecurity and hunger in our region. The participants will share insights learned through the Challenge with the Pittsburgh Food Bank.
Understanding Civic Resilience in Homewood and Surrounding Neighborhoods
Daren Ellerbee (Community Engagement Center in Homewood), Beth Schwanke (Pitt Cyber), Rachel Rubin (University Library System), Lara Putnam (Department of History)
This project will develop a nuanced understanding of racialized information contexts and how disinformation differentially affects communities of color, providing novel and significant data on the observed prevalence of disinformation and its effects. The project team will create an understanding of the value of digital civic spaces and how to build resilience to disinformation into them through a co-creation model. Together with community members, the team will build the Homewood Digital Civic Asset Map, which will provide in-depth data and analysis of the wealth of digital spaces used by residents, many of which are neglected by existing research. The map and analysis will help residents, neighborhood organizations, researchers, and others identify: (1) healthy digital civic spaces; (2) digital civic spaces where resiliency might be improved; (3) elements that create healthy digital civic spaces. Through this community-partnered work, the award recipients anticipate an improved understanding of the information/disinformation ecosystem that is actionable and useful to residents, researchers, and policy-makers.