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Living Museum of Christmas Island

Title

Reanimating Christmas Island's Place-based History

A "Talking Map" from the inagural public mapping event at the George Fam Centre

"Living Museum of Christmas Island" is an ongoing project. Visit the project website to learn more.

Project Website

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Visualizing The Railroad

Title

A Digital Geography of the Transcontinental Railroad

Background

From the Chinese Railroad Workers project website


A New Geography

Despite the lack of practically any written records, including quantitative data, on the lives of the Chinese workers, geographic data on the route of the railroad does exist. Spanning the Sierras and long stretches of Utah desert, the western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad traverses extremes of blizzard-condition peaks and scorching flats. The labor and perseverance of the workers through these conditions resulted in not just the successful completion of the railroad but feats of engineering ingenuity, at no small cost to human life.

At the project’s start, I prototyped ways to use interactivity to communicate sparse historical weather data. View prototype on InVision.

I also explored geolocation libraries for visualizing data, including d3.js, Mapbox.js, and Leaflet.js.
View the Mapbox map.

Using Adobe Illustrator and Google Maps, I created map images to illustrate the physicality of the railroad.
These digital recreations show the physical drama of the railroad route overlaid onto present-day infrastructure.


Publication

Geography of Chinese Workers Building the Transcontinental Railroad is an interactive map of the railroad and its key narrative points, incorporating historic essay and photographs with digital recreations of these key locations. An interactive top-map allows navigation of the railroad route and visualization of elevation alongside narrative written by historian Hilton Obenzinger.

Key challenges to this project included creating a design that allowed meaningful visualization given limited data and balancing data-driven visualization with narrative or illustration. The end result is a digital essay published on the project website.

View the Site

An interactive topmap displays location, elevation, and progress along the route as a reader progresses through the essay.


Public Recognition

Presenting at Voices in Digital Humanities 2019

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Unmasking the Trolls

Title

Exploring Russian Interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections

Background

Full network of mentions between Russian Twitter bots (red)
and real accounts (green) from 2014-2017.


The Visualizations

Interactive graph of mentions among Russian Twitter bots.


Results

Rehydrated tweets of deleted troll account @ten_gop.
Ineractive timeseries above shows number of posts per day.

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Island of Migrants

Title

Investigating Christmas Island's Moving Populations

Background

Christmas Island is a tiny rock in the Indian Ocean, hundreds of miles from the nearest land. Despite its physical isolation, the island is a microcosm of intersecting migrations. Every wet season, millions of endemic red crabs descend from the jungles to the coast in the Christmas Island red crab migration. The island is crisscrossed with a network of manmade tunnels, bridges, and fences to get these crabs to their destination safely. At the same time, the island holds one of Australia’s largest immigration detention centers, built and run like a prison for boat-bound asylum seekers hoping to enter Australia’s borders.

This project uses narrative interview to investigate the way that these two migrations, animal and human, are treated differently.


A Research Journey

In October 2018, I traveled to Christmas Island for 2 months to conduct interviews with islanders, asylum seekers, and immigration activists and tell the story of these intersection migrations. This journey is documented through a personal blog, Shorebound.

My final product, an audio podcast, was presented at Digital Frontiers 2019. You can listen to the podcast, Following the Water, anywhere you get your podcasts. This project has been presented at several conferences including Stanford’s April Symposium of Research and Public Service, and The Gallery, a student-run art exhibit.

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Beef, Bread, and Rice

Title

Reimagining the Diet of the Stanford Arboretum Chinese Laborers

Background

Chinese and Anglo-American artifacts from 2017 excavations.

Stoneware canning lid fragment, one of the
objects analyzed in the project.


An Art-Archaeology Collaboration

"Beef, Bread, and Rice" is an essay and art collaboration. The project is the culmination of a period of excavation in the field at the ACLQ, selecting and photographing artifacts, creating digital illustrations, and collaborating with local artist Cathy Yang. The project focuses on four artifacts excavated at the Arboretum Chinese Labor Quarters (ACLQ) and their implications for the cross-cultural nature of Chinese laborer diets.

Cathy Yang created original illustrations of traditional Chinese food vessels alongside western food vessels, depicting original artifacts from the site. These images were created to spark a reimagination of laborer diets, one that integrates food traditions from Chinese and American culture. These illustrations imagine the objects uncovered in the ACLQ in their everyday forms: holding food, with Chinese and western flavors coexisting. They achieve the same goal that historical archaeology of Chinese laborers in California aims towards: to more fully and richly imagine the lives of people past. Her original illustrations are below.

“Piece 1”, Cathy Yang

Featuring Heinz ketchup bottle, pickle fork, rice bowl, and Chinese brown-glazed liquor jug

“Piece 2", Cathy Yang

Featuring yellowware, bourbon bottle, wintergreen teacup, and teapot

To see more of Cathy's work, visit her website.


I also created original digital illustrations for the project which document duplicates of two of the four artifacts found across various resale sites online. While excavating these objects on-site at the ACLQ lends the objects a sense of intimacy and familiarity, encountering the same artifacts like the pickle fork and Weir canning lid sold across several "antique" resale sites provides a reminder of the artifacts' existence in a wider context and reflects on the role commercialization plays in turning artifacts into objects.

“16 Resold Weir Jars”

Collection of Weir jars from various resale sites

“8 Vintage Pickle Forks”

Collection of identical Reiss & Brady pickle forks from various resale sites

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Panther Power

Title

Understanding Spatial Organization of
the Black Panther Party's Power in the Bay Area

Background

Newspaper advertisement for paper distribution sites


Historical and Spatial Data

Georeferenced police districts from a hand-drawn Party map

Georeferencing historic maps of the Bay Area


Results

Our final project, presented poster-style, is below.

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How the Soil Crumbles

Title

A Multimedia Tour of the Soils of Southern Stanford

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Streets of the World

Title

Redesigning A Classic Museum Exhibit

Background

The Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose


Learning Space Design

Choosing designs based on ease of prototyping

Prototyping our interactive project at the museum.


Results

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What Else C.S. Coterms Study

Title

How Diverse are Double Majors?

A recent trend at Stanford, particularly within the past five years, has been increased efforts to make computer science education accessible to more students with diverse interests. In 2014, Stanford introduced its experimental CS + X joint major that combined computer science with humanities fields like English and History; in 2015, the Digital Humanities minor was launched. Within the computer science department, opportunities like the Magic Grant through partnership with the Brown Institute for Media Innovation encourage computer science students to collaborate with students in journalism and media. In the context of recent emphasis on interdisciplinary education, this visualization examines how many computer science coterms studied non-CS majors as undergraduates and how many double majors crossed the disciplinary bounds of engineering, humanities, and sciences.

While the computer science program at Stanford is growing in popularity, many students pursuing the coterminal degree come from unconventional backgrounds. Among double majors (students with two bachelor’s degrees), what fields are represented, and what fields are most commonly combined? To answer this question, this visualization displays occurrences of double majors among Stanford C.S. coterms from 2014-2019. Double majoring is relatively uncommon; between 2014 and 2019, twenty-four C.S. coterms had more than one undergraduate major. To have enough data to show meaningful patterns, the visualization does not encode year and instead displays data from the entire 6-year period as a sample of Stanford’s most recent classes of coterms.

Data from Stanford Institutional Research and Decision Support 2014-2019 records.

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Keyword Poetry

Title

Poems Written Exclusively with Programming Keywords

"It’s a common misconception to think that programming and creativity are worlds apart. The assumption is grounded in a fundamental but incomplete truth...There is no room for imprecision in software. No place for double-meanings or subtext.”

-Gil Fewster, "Programming is Poetry"

"OR", a poem written in C++

Read the Poems

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Thread

Title

A Crowdsourced Solution to Secondhand Shopping

Background

Needfinding by interviewing the owner of a local thrift shop


Solution


Recognition

Team Thread at the project expo

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Waiter, There's a Fly In My Soup

Title

An Interactive Exploration of Restaurant Inspection Scores in Palo Alto

Reanimating Christmas Island's Place-based History

Living Museum of Christmas Island

Exploring Russian Interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections

Unmasking the Trolls

A Digital Geography of the Transcontinental Railroad

Visualizing the Railroad

Investigating Christmas Island's Moving Populations

Island of Migrants

Reimagining the Diet of the Stanford Arboretum Chinese Laborers

Beef, Bread, and Rice

Understanding Spatial Organization of the Black Panther Party's Power in the Bay Area

Panther Power

A Multimedia Tour of the Soils of Southern Stanford

How The Soil Crumbles

Redesigning A Classic Museum Exhibit

Streets of the World

How diverse are double majors among C.S. coterms?

Double Majors

Poems Written Exclusively with Programming Keywords

Keyword Poetry

A Crowdsourced Solution to Secondhand Shopping

Thread

An Interactive Exploration of Restaurant Inspection Scores in Palo Alto

Waiter, There's a Fly In My Soup