Between 1864 and 1869, thousands of Chinese migrants toiled at a grueling pace and in perilous working conditions to help construct America’s first Transcontinental Railroad. The Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project seeks to give a voice to the Chinese migrants whose labor on the Transcontinental Railroad helped to shape the physical and social landscape of the American West.

- From the project website

The Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project is a landmark example of the power of research and visualization in unearthing previously untold histories. The history of the Chinese laborers who toiled for the railroad that connected America’s coasts was almost completely unwritten before this project. Relying on archaeological findings, oral histories of railroad worker descendants, and innovative visualization techniques, the project has created the first definitive history of the Chinese railroad workers that tells the story from their perspective.

I presented this project at the 150th Anniversary of the Golden Spike commemoration at Stanford University and 2019 Voices in Digital Humanities Conference at the College of Wooster.

The Chinese Railroad Workers of North America project was widely recognized for its contributions to history and research for the 150th Anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad.

Russian Twitter interference in the 2016 U.S. election is a well-documented and frightening phenomenon. While there are rich datasets of Twitter accounts identified as trolls, many questions remain about how the accounts managed to find such success.

Our team built a visual explainer that explores what allowed Russian bot accounts to so successfully interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. In our analysis, we also discovered implications that the 2016 interference has on our upcoming 2020 presidential election.

What strategies allowed Russian bot accounts to succeed in interfering in the 2016 U.S. election? We divided our investigation into three areas: language over time, popularity of individual accounts, and relationships between trolls. We created interactive visualizations, including a word cloud over time of top hashtags, a graph of account interactions (troll and non-troll mentions), and a rehydrated feed of two "supertroll" accounts.

Through the process of analysis and visualization, we discovered specific strategies that troll accounts used to find success: establishing themselves as genuinely American through language, impersonating individuals or institutions to establish authenticity, and relying on amplification from other trolls in their network. We’ve not only discovered the extent of the 2016 attack but also learned that the attack is still ongoing. The suspended accounts in our dataset continued to tweet into 2017. With the 2020 election coming up, we plan to continue sharing our visual explainer publicly to share our findings with a broader audience.

A cliffside interview

For fun: a video of the natural beauty of the island, made from my time there.

In 1879, prominent senator James G. Blaine said, “You cannot work a man who must have beef and bread, and would prefer beef, alongside a man who can live on rice.” This statement captured the anti-Chinese sentiment prevalent in late-19th-century California, which fixated on the otherness of Chinese cuisine as a reason for viewing Chinese laborers as less-than-human. In archaeology, this legacy has been historically reflected in the study of ceramic food vessels and other Chinese artifacts that “seem to fascinate the archaeologist” with their “sense of ‘otherness.’”

However, this narrative of Chinese food separating the Chinese as inhuman and un-American is incomplete. Even before the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese laborers in California were purchasing and consuming American foods, if not out of preference, at least out of necessity. Artifacts from the Arboretum Chinese Labor Quarters (ACLQ) in Stanford, California offer a glimpse into the culinary lives of these laborers and what they were really eating. “Beef, Bread, and Rice” combines object study with visual illustrations to reimagine a more complex history: one where Chinese immigrants curated a diet that allowed familiar Chinese foods and new American flavors to coexist.

The project was scheduled to be presented at TAG 2020, the annual Theoretical Arcaheology Group Conference; unfortunately, the conference was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the illustrations created for this project are published below.

Founded in Oakland, California in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the Black Panther Party’s movement expanded from the Bay Area throughout the United States and the world. While the theories and politics of the party have been well-documented, less is know about how Black Power was practically mapped out into the Bay Area’s geography in practice. How was Black Panther Party power in the Bay Area organized spatially? What constituted power from the Party's perspective?

In this mapping project, we visualize and reflect on the geographical distribution of “Black Power” by mapping the landscape of the Black Panther Party’s reach in the Bay Area. Where did Black Panther Party seek to make an impact? What neighborhoods seemed most important to the Panthers and why? Our data focuses on 1971, a year that was both a peak in many ways and also marked by major party splits that foretold its decline.

Digitizing an Archive

We created a series of 5 maps, focusing on the the distribution of the Party’s newspaper (The Black Panther), the Party’s records of local black-owned businesses, the Party’s offices, the properties the Party owned, and Bay Area racial demographics. Most of this data came from documents in the Stanford Special Collections, like lists of black-owned businesses in 1971 and lists of paper distribution sites. We digitized this data into a working archive to create our maps. Data on Bay Area racial demographics came from the 1970 census.

Georeferencing

We also georeferenced historic maps of San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland to create our final maps. Included in some of our maps are hand-drawn policing districts from a map that the Party created; we digitally overlaid these policing zones onto the maps to compare how the Party viewed neighborhoods with where their power was reflected.

This walking tour was designed to draw the attention of the user to their physical surroundings in a way that changes their experience of the world. It is an exploration into framing as a creative act. Using multimedia, including augmented reality, this self-guided walking tour traverses the southern portion of Stanford’s campus, exploring native and artificial soil types. The walking tour was designed to be experienced on a mobile phone.

Preview the tour by scrolling through to the right. If you are on a mobile device, click below to experience the tour.

Preview of augmented reality feature: Munsell soil chart overlaid on “reality” as seen through phone camera.

“Streets of the World” is a signature exhibit in the San Jose Children’s Discovery Museum. Designed for children aged 0-10, the exhibit is the first thing visitors encounter when they enter the museum and is made to encourage interaction with “streets” of local San Jose and the surrounding Bay Area.

In 2017, the exhibit had not been updated for 26 years, and the museum wanted a technology-based redesign of this well-loved exhibit.

After several rounds of in-person observation at the museum, we decided to prioritize the values of cohesion, reflection of identity, and inclusive play while integrating new technology into the signature exhibit. With these values, we designed an interactive projection-based landscape that would allow children to easily interact with the visual city around them and explore new locales. A shared interactive surface encourages collaborative play among children.

We created a lean prototype for an interactive, projection-based exhibit of live streets around the world. The emphasis of this project was on rapid prototypability, and were able to quickly test our idea on-site with a teammate hidden behind the screen responsible for the "interactions."

We presented our final product, a blueprint of the exhibit redesign, to the museum for inclusion in the Institute of Museum and Library Services Grant. We also created a short video documenting our design process.

A feature of programming languages that is easy to overlook is their innate English-ness. Nothing demonstrates the human-ness of code more than the coding languages themselves. The word “if” means as much to computers as an equivalent bit string, but to humans it creates a statement that has power and meaning. Coding is, in its most readily available form, a set of human-understandable words manipulated to be understood by machines as well. The inherent English-ness of code is something so deeply prevalent that English-speakers often hardly notice it.

Keyword Poetry is inspired by this English-ness inherent in code. As something often overlooked, the power of keywords and their meanings in non-programming contexts emerge when we use code for non-coding purposes. What if we could create human-exclusive meaning using a language designed for machines? What if we wrote poems exclusively using programming keywords?

Without the financial freedom to shop at mainstream retail stores, low-income shoppers often spend hours at multiple thrift shops in search of a particular clothing item that fits their style, size, and fit. Even with this high effort, they frequently don’t find what they’re looking for.

Thread is a mobile app that connects low-income shoppers to their desired look in less time by pooling together the browsing capacities of other thrift shoppers in the area. Shoppers can submit “seeks”, or requests for specific items of clothing that they hope to find nearby. They can also submit “spots” when they find clothing that matches other shoppers’ requests. With Thread, shoppers can get what exactly what they want faster, because their entire community is shopping with them.

Thread is a cashless, crowdsourced solution to secondhand shopping.

Shoppers who are looking for specific items, like a graphic tee, can request them using an image search or by uploading reference photos. Shoppers can also browse requests that others have made near them using a map interface and take photos of items that match. Requesters can browse matches and visit stores in-person to pick up items they like from a designated location.

Our team presented Thread at the 2019 Human-Centered Design Expo at Stanford University and won Best Concept and first runner-up for Best Overall Project.

To learn more about the process for designing and building Thread, visit our project website.

You can view the high-fidelity prototype of the final app here.

An interactive visualization of restaurant inspection scores in the South Bay area, created in d3. Data scraped from the Santa Clara County Department of Health in January 2020.