My research on civic data has many openings beyond academia. Similar to Katie Ulrich's reflections on her documentation of sugarcane, I am currently very interested in what kind of archiving and data curation will support my research and make it relevant to different stakeholders (activists, journalists, community members). With collaborators in Texas and Taiwan, I have made first steps towards a Formosa Plastics Archive -- sorting through material about Formosa that is already out there. While I use the Disaster STS Research Network for this project, I am also learning about and trying out ways of visualizing data. Together with undergraduate students in the course Environmental Injustice (UC Irvine), we have started to make maps of high-risk industrial facilities and use an Instagram account to relay findings from the coursework. There is certainly a productive tension moving between DIY archiving, open-source software projects like PECE and communicating research on highly commercialized platforms. In the workshop, I would be glad to share and discuss tactics for documenting and archiving research.
