Board of Trustees Annual Report Book 2

Barnard College 2022-2023 Annual Reports

VICE PROVOST’S INTRODUCTION

Welcome to our annual report on the Barnard Library and Milstein centers, the nexus for innovative teaching and learning located in the very heart of Barnard’s campus. Since their establishment in 2018, the Milstein centers have become vital hubs of pedagogical innovation and expert discussions about how technology is transforming the liberal arts. In the following pages, we invite you to explore how our centers support our worldclass instructors in the classroom and contribute to their fields of expertise.

Our centers, though diverse in focus, share a common commitment to supporting our educators as they pioneer the integration of new technologies into a rapidly evolving landscape of liberal arts education. Whether it is in analyzing the connections between brain and body in movement, thinking critically about data and its representation, understanding how computational thinking is changing our society, or capturing the material and spatial relationships between objects and our environment, our centers are dedicated to empowering our students and faculty to discover new forms of interdisciplinary research and knowledge production.

Collectively, library and the centers support and continuously help to update Barnard’s pioneering “Foundations” curriculum and maintain our commitment to the liberal arts, foster diversity and inclusion, and ensure the ethical use of new technologies. From hosting hands-on workshops and trainings in new digital tools and software to involving students in the assessment of new pedagogical techniques and supporting their cuttingedge research projects, our centers provide our students with the new tools and skills required to thrive while at Barnard and equip them to impact and lead in their chosen fields after they graduate.

Beyond their classroom support, our research centers also serve as catalysts for the intellectual scrutiny of emerging trends and challenges. Throughout the year, our centers host a variety of events that welcome leading scholars and practitioners to campus to examine research trends and policy debates within their respective areas of focus. These gatherings bring together leading researchers, students, and community members to foster a vibrant exchange of ideas and a deeper understanding of the pressing issues that intersect the liberal arts and technology. The report captures many of these programming initiatives, showcasing our commitment to shaping the intellectual landscape of our practical fields in a manner consistent with our values.

In the upcoming year, we are excited to continue our dual mission of supporting educators in the classroom and driving reflection and debate. As we engage with the immense challenges and opportunities brought by generative AI and other emerging technologies that are disrupting our workplace and world, we anticipate even more transformative developments on both fronts. We are excited to share these endeavors with you and extend a heartfelt invitation to all to be a part of our mission. Visit our research centers, engage with our vibrant community, and attend our programs.

Thank you for your interest and support, and we look forward to continuing Barnard’s remarkable journey with you.

Alexander Cooley Vice Provost for Research, Libraries and Academic Centers

Barnard Library and Academic Information Services (BLAIS)

OVERVIEW

The Barnard Library and Academic Information Services (BLAIS) is a core partner in Barnard’s mission, connecting our community with resources for discovery and teaching skills for intellectual risk-taking to enable our students to engage purposefully with the full scope of the Barnard education and beyond.

To do this vital work, we

• develop and sustain excellent services that enable students, faculty, and external scholars to engage with our collections, to research deeply, and to create new knowledge in all media;

• build rigorous, diverse, and distinctive collections. These include:

• works in all media that support the Barnard curriculum,

• extensive collections in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and in dance, as a Columbia University Libraries affiliate,

• the Barnard Archives & Special Collections, documenting campus and academic life at Barnard, collections of prominent alumnae, as well as broader feminist histories,

• the Barnard Zine library, a world-renowned collection of zines on a diverse range of topics with an emphasis on feminism and femme identities;

• provide equitable, affirming access to our spaces and collections;

• supply and develop innovative technologies to support teaching and learning;

• partner with faculty, our colleagues in the Academic Centers, and across Barnard to support student success; and

• ground all of our work in values of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

As an affiliate of the Columbia University Libraries (CUL), we contribute to and connect our community to CUL’s extraordinary research collections. We welcome users to our beautiful, light-filled spaces on three floors of the Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning, with open stacks of some 130,000 print books, zines, and media, shared study spaces, nine reservable group study rooms, and 15 computers equipped with a range of software. Our collections and services are available in person, online, and hybrid (in person and online simultaneously). We also welcome a broad community of researchers, colleagues, and neighbors who conduct research in Archives & Special Collections or the Zine Library and participate in exhibits, events, and workshops.

All BLAIS departments collaborate broadly and deeply across campus and beyond. We partner with the academic centers and other units on workshops, events, and exhibits and with Access Barnard on textbook affordability programs and other services for first-generation and low-income students. We collaborate with the class deans, CARDS, CARES, the DEI Office, and the Student Government Association to support every student’s success. We manage and provide training in the technology used in every course and classroom at Barnard. We work with Events Management on hundreds of in-person, online, and hybrid events that are sponsored by the President’s Office, Development and Alumnae Relations, Community Engagement, Student Experience and Engagement, academic programs, and student groups. We partner with Beyond Barnard each year to employ dozens of students who provide crucial labor for our services while gaining professional development in libraries, archives, and media.

Our six departments are each led by a director who reports to the Dean of BLAIS. The departments are:

• Collections Strategy, Access, and Engagement

• Teaching, Learning, and Research Services

• Archives & Special Collections

• Zine Library

• Instructional Media and Technology Services (IMATS)

• IMATS AV Services

Total staff is 36 FTE (of which 13 are 2110 union positions), plus five or six parttime graduate assistants, and dozens of undergraduate student staff.

Collections Strategy, Access, and Engagement (CSAE)

This department supports access to the library in a very broad sense — acquiring and providing access to the Library’s general collections and supporting equitable uses of our spaces. The two teams, Technical Services and Access Services, work closely with colleagues at Columbia University Libraries, who maintain the infrastructure of CLIO, our shared library catalog, and coordinate collection sharing and access policies.

The two Technical Services specialists work with the Director to select, purchase, and catalog materials for the general collection. This is done in collaboration with the Personal Librarians (PLs), guided by the needs of Barnard curriculum, and supported by operations funding and a variety of endowments and gifts.

The Access Services team of five is our public-facing staff, welcoming all users to our spaces and managing collections from the Information and Circulation desk, open seven days and 70 hours a week during the semester. This team coordinates collection sharing with CUL, facilitates interlibrary loans, scans library materials, and supports our users’ access to other collections worldwide. We also manage the efficient movement of materials from our off-site storage facility, which holds about 20,000 lower-use items.

We are committed to textbook affordability so that students need not select majors or individual courses based on the costs of textbooks. We work closely with faculty on Course Reserves, for short-term loans of required course material. In partnership with students, we offer the First-Generation and Low-Income (FLI) Library, the goal of which is to collect the works required in all majors. Students who self-identify and register as FLI may check out these materials for a full semester.

Staff: Director, Community & Student Engagement Librarian, six Library Specialists, 10-12 student workers

Teaching, Learning, and Research Services (TLRS)

This team connects students, faculty, and other researchers to collections, provides training in research methods, and builds our collections. Our five Personal Librarians (PLs), a signature library service, offer personalized research support to every student and faculty member at Barnard. PLs proactively communicate with the community about library offerings; provide research consultations; teach course-based and extracurricular workshops; and organize and support library and cross-campus events. PLs play a key role in the First-Year Writing and First-Year Seminar programs, ensuring that students gain the research skills and methods they need to engage with a comprehensive research library. Each PL is also subject specialist and liaison to academic departments. In this role, PLs build our collection in all media under the leadership of the Director of Collections Strategy, Access, and Engagement and in consultation with faculty, ensuring that the collection meets evolving curricular needs.

Staff: Director, five Personal Librarians, one student worker

Archives and Special Collections

We collect materials that document Barnard’s history, the personal papers of many remarkable artists, organizers, and scholars who have attended Barnard, and special collections on broader feminist histories. We provide source material to students, staff, alums, faculty, administrators, and other members of the Barnard College community, as well as to researchers, activists, and artists. We support teaching with the collection and curate exhibits, bringing students and other audiences into direct contact with unique primary sources. Our work is informed by reparative and redistributive frameworks to actively confront histories of exclusion of people with marginalized identities within our collections.

Staff: Director, Associate Director, two graduate assistants, four student workers As of July 2023, we also have a new Records Coordinator and Processing Archivist.

Zine Library

The Barnard Zine Library was founded in 2003 as one of the first such collections in any library and is one of the leading collections in the English-speaking world. Zines are generally handmade, small-circulation, self-published works, created with a DIY aesthetic and addressing a wide range of topics. Now with some 14,000 zines, the Barnard Zine Library has an innovative practice of acquiring two copies of each zine — one for the archives, and one circulating. We collect zines by creators of color and women, as well as trans and gender-nonconforming creators. The collection is regularly used by Barnard/Columbia courses, as well as domestic and international researchers. It is also a source for critical pedagogy and media literacy.

Staff: Director, one graduate assistant, four student workers

Instructional Media and Academic Technology Services (IMATS)

This group has two teams, Academic Technology and Media

Academic Technology supports the mission-critical technology for Barnard’s teaching and learning and are campus leaders on best practices for teaching with technology. The team is primarily faculty-facing and are creative, proactive problem solvers. We work with CUIT to manage the tools for virtually all Barnard courses: Courseworks (the online platform used for syllabi, assignments, grading, and communication with students), the course evaluation system, and many other connected applications. During the pandemic, this team led the rapid implementation of Zoom to bring all Barnard courses online; Zoom remains a core element of infrastructure to enable hybrid teaching. This team also manages the digital storage systems to host faculty and student digital projects, as well as the Archives digital collections. We offer training to students and

faculty in data analysis, text mining, and related methods. We provide expertise for the College on web accessibility standards, including accessibility for online course materials.

The Media team operates a heavily used lending service to students and faculty for media equipment — cameras, lights, microphones, tripods, audio recorders, and more. Team members also provide videography and photography services for a range of partners across campus. The Media team also staff the Sloate Media Center; see their separate annual report.

Staff: Director, two Senior Associate Directors, three technology roles, one media specialist, and one admin assistant, plus 15 student workers

IMATS AV Services and Classroom Technologies

The team is responsible for audiovisual equipment and services in all classes and events at the College. We install, maintain, and repair AV systems (cameras, microphones, speakers, video screens, projectors, and related software and computers) in 10 buildings, 101 classrooms, and 16 event spaces. We work closely with partners across the College to implement consistent and high-quality AV experiences in all these spaces for in-person and hybrid experiences, incorporating Zoom, YouTube, and other technologies into the toolkit. The AV team provides daily classroom support and training for faculty, staff, and students in using this interlocking set of tools. We also work closely with Barnard Events Management to support hundreds of events throughout the year, seven days and evenings a week, including in-person and hybrid events, online webinars, and livestreamed events.

Staff: Director and (as of Fall 2022) Associate Director, with five Audiovisual Services Technicians, and four student workers

GENERAL SUMMARY OF THE YEAR

This year demonstrated anew that post-pandemic services and collections must be offered in multiple modes. Students, faculty, and colleagues want to meet with us in offices, classrooms, and on Zoom, expect to have access to both digital and print collections, and assume that meetings, classes, and events can easily include both inperson and remote participants.

To meet these expectations requires flexibility, investment in a growing range of technologies, and a staff with the skills not only to use these tools effectively but also to plan, budget for, and implement ongoing upgrades to them.

We hired five new colleagues in existing positions this year:

• Liam Adler, Director of Collections Strategy, Access, and Engagement

• Tatiana Bryant, Director of Teaching, Learning, and Research Services

• Jess Saldaña, IMATS Media Specialist

• Ian Titus, Library Access Services Project Specialist

• Rachel Finn, History and Humanities Librarian

And filled one new position:

• July Brown, Associate Director of AV Services, to manage the increase in and growing complexity of AV for events

Two searches during the year brought new colleagues early in FY24:

• A new position was approved for Archives & Special Collections — our first Records Coordinator and Processing Archivist, to improve management of College records, Olivia Newsome

• Fannie Ouyang, Community and Student Engagement Librarian. This fills an existing position, to manage the Access Services team and lead outreach and engagement programs.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF 2022-2023

This year, we reconvened the BLAIS Faculty Advisory Committee, which had ceased during the pandemic. The committee provides discussion, consultation, and input on our collections, services, and spaces. Its members are Ralph Ghoche, Assistant Professor of Architecture; Rebecca Donegan, Assistant Professor of Chemistry; Abosede George, Tow Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies; Manijeh Moradian, Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Alexander Cooley, Vice Provost for Research, Academic Centers and Library; Leslie Grinage, the Dean of the College; Melissa Wright, Executive Director of the Center for Engaged Pedagogy; and Melanie Hibbert, Director of IMATS and the Sloate Media Center. This group has already proved to be engaged partners, providing thoughtful feedback on collection development policies, integrating the teaching of research methods more deeply across the curriculum, and consulting on other initiatives.

In collaboration with the Provost’s Office, we welcomed the installation of artwork in the library by Renée Green, the Lida A. Orzeck ’68 Distinguished Artist-inResidence for 2023. To support engagement with her work, we developed a display of her published writings and will collaborate on programming during the Fall semester when she is on campus.

Collections Strategy, Access, and Engagement

The Access Services team managed 14,837 circulations (an increase from 11,895 last year), and for interlibrary lending, 322 loans from our collection and 866 requests by our users from collections elsewhere. Our self-checkout kiosk handled 2,152 transactions, providing service during late evening hours when our circulation desk is not staffed. Technical Services oversaw the acquisition, cataloging, and shelving of 2,657 new items to the collection. 354 items were checked out for a full semester from the FLI Library collection, a critical service for low-income students. 330 items were borrowed for short-term use from Course Reserves.

We began a detailed analysis of our collections this year, the first since our move into the Milstein Center in 2018. We will analyze the subject distribution of our materials, identify low-use materials that may best be stored offsite, ensure physical care of materials, and support plans for shifting as the collection grows.

The search for a new Community and Student Engagement Librarian during the spring inspired creative thinking and planning for innovations in student outreach. We are excited about the arrival of Fannie Ouyang in this role in August 2023.

Teaching, Learning, and Research Services (TLRS)

We once again offered a full slate of teaching in courses, consultations, and workshops. Instruction sessions remained steady at 130 sessions, reaching approximately 2,015 students. There was a shift to more in-person teaching this year versus last: 90% of sessions took place in the library’s instruction lab or the classroom where the course usually meets (compared with 71% last year), with 10% on Zoom. Many in-class sessions had participants attending via Zoom, however, so we continued to upgrade our instruction lab with the addition of improved cameras and microphones to support hybrid instruction. Nearly half of our teaching was in the First-Year Writing program, with the rest spread across disciplines. Of 829 consultations, half were (at the request of the user) held on Zoom. About threequarters of consultation sessions were with students to discuss assignment-based research, including senior thesis and capstone projects. Notable outreach sessions this year include several Access Barnard Pre-Orientation Programs and our ongoing partnerships with the Summer Research Institute (SRI), Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, and Laidlaw Scholars.

Director Tatiana Bryant, who arrived in September, began development of a new initiative. Noting that the bulk of our engagement with students was at the beginning and end of their time at Barnard — with half our teaching sessions in First-Year Writing, and many student consultations for senior capstone projects — she is leading the team in the exploration of methods to deepen our engagement across all four years of the curriculum. We began the design of library research methods “lab” modules, work that continues in FY24 with the development of pilot projects in both asynchronous/online and in-class modes.

Archives & Special Collections

We built extraordinary new collections, guided by our revised Collection Development Policy, with the support of colleagues in the Collections Strategy team and in collaboration with campus partners. New collections this year included

Nijsten, Nina. Scissors & Chainsaws No. 2 : Diary Comic Zine. Made in July 2020 during International Zine Month. Ghent, Belgium: Nina Nijsten, 2020.

writer Sigrid Nunez ’72’s planned posthumous gift of her personal papers, the planned acquisition of Nia Ashley ’16’s oral history interviews with Black Barnard alums, the acquisition of G.B. Jones’s collection of queercore zines and ephemera, and Erin Cramer ’86’s taped interviews about Valerie Solanas, the SCUM Manifesto, and the role of violence in feminist movements.

Events: We celebrated the acquisition of the Coalition for Women Prisoners collection, which documents feminist anti-carceral organizing, with events and the creation of oral histories. We were also awarded a Reproductive Justice grant of $10,000 from the College to expand scholarly and activist use of this important collection. Other programming included an exhibit at the Public Theater/Barnard College Ntozake Shange Social Justice Theater Residency.

We completed a major migration of our digital collections website (digitalcollections. barnard.edu) to a beautiful new platform for improved discovery and enhanced access to over 6,000 highly used items, such as the yearbook, the Barnard Bulletin, Barnard Magazine, photographs, and oral histories.

This year, we saw a greater return to instruction and reference services than we had before COVID — we logged 462 reference interactions, almost 100 more than FY22.

We conducted a search to fill a new position in the Archives, Records Coordinator and Processing Archivist. This position expands our full-time staff from two to three, enabling us to improve our procedures for collecting College records, a critical service. Olivia Newsome joined us in July 2023.

Zine Library

The Zine Library added 711 new zines to the collection this year, on par with previous years. We had a significant increase in instruction sessions, from 27 the previous year to a record high of 39 in AY23, reaching 573 students in classes. This small team (Director plus part-time zine tech/graduate assistant and student workers) also offered 52 consultations and 262 research interviews. Director Jenna Freedman taught a zinefocused course, The Perzine Is Political, in the Pre-College Program.

The Zine Library secured a $30,000 grant from the NEH to support planning and development of an international collaborative online zine catalog.

We began planning for the 20th anniversary of the Barnard Zine Library in Fall 2023.

IMATS

We recognize that hybrid learning — combining in-person and online methods — is now the new normal. Our team continues to support the technologies that enable all such teaching at the College. Our strategic planning this year aimed to extend and improve our services and to ensure that the College is prepared for abrupt changes (whether from new technologies, pandemics, weather disasters, or other unpredictable events).

A few examples of this strategic approach:

• We developed a checklist of actions needed for short-term shifts to remote learning in the event of a sudden disaster.

• We engaged with the emergence of generative AI by rapidly educating ourselves and collaborating with the Center for Engaged Pedagogy to provide AI workshops, a Faculty Guide to Generative AI, and a Barnard Bold conference for faculty, students, and staff on the topic.

• We extended and improved our web-hosting services by formalizing policies and procedures, brought our hosted sites into full compliance after a BCIT security audit, and expanded the service to include more support for the academic centers.

• Liaised with CUIT to address changes in the Panopto service model, and coordinated Barnard’s response via Provost’s office to ensure we didn’t lose faculty-created videos and develop communications to prepare faculty for these changes.

We provided multiple workshops and open office hours to help faculty more effectively use Zoom and Courseworks. Course evaluatIons are also an important element of our work. To improve the system, we automated parts of the pre-evaluation process with Python scripts, saving the team countless hours and reducing opportunity for human error. We worked with the Provost’s Office to revamp our communications to staff (Chairs and DAs), faculty, and students for improved clarity. In Fall 2022, 5,855 unique students evaluated 618 courses, with an average 72% response rate. In Spring 2023, those numbers were 5,858 unique students across 639 sections, and a response rate of 64%. We also provided course evaluations for summer session classes and for the Writing, Speaking, Science Writing, and Computing Fellows programs.

Our new Academic Systems Technologist, Cristy Danford, built a strong relationship with the CUL IT group, enabling us to provide long-needed reports of Barnard library collections and usage data and to participate in the planning for a new integrated library system.

We provided extensive technical support to the Archives’ digital collection migration project to ensure both effective data migration and effective accessibility and UX design for the new site.

Among many other activities, the Tech team supported a whole range of student and faculty data analysis and web-design projects, planned and taught sessions in the Thinking Digitally Summer Institute, and collaborated with multiple centers on a range of workshops.

AV Services

AV services are significantly more complex in the post-pandemic environment. The expectation that all classes and events may be hybrid (with instructors, speakers, students, and/or audience members all potentially participating in person and online) does not match the reality of our physical spaces, many of which are aging. Though we have worked diligently to upgrade multiple systems in all classrooms and event spaces, collaborating with colleagues in Capital Projects, Facilities, BCIT, the Provost’s Office, and more, we have had neither the budget nor the capacity to fully achieve the goal of having standard high-quality equipment in place across the College. With the LeFrak and Altschul renovations underway, we are also involved in planning and recommending systems and shifting equipment to swing spaces. In the face of these challenges, we appreciated that the budget request process for FY24 enabled us to have detailed conversations with the Provost’s budget team to specify the costs and long-term planning required to improve and maintain this core infrastructure.

We were also grateful to receive approval to add a new position, Associate Director of AV Services. July Brown started in October 2022 with the responsibility of addressing the increased demands of the additional work and planning needed for complex hybrid events and classroom support. Of the 838 events we supported this year, 314 (38%) were hybrid, a dramatic rise from 157 hybrid the previous year. Hybrid events require significantly more planning and often multiple staff members to ensure success. We have responded to the challenge in multiple ways: developing training materials and working closely with Events Management and other campus partners to define planning needs and set clear guidelines. For classroom technology, we have continued to provide training materials so that instructors are able to use the multiple systems. We’ve provided training for our AV technology specialists on new systems and have upgraded their positions to recognize the increased expertise of this work.

We supported 838 events this year. Particularly complex examples that ran successfully include:

• Multiday, campus-wide programs with dozens of simultaneous events, such as New Student Orientation and Alumni Reunion

• Two Barnard All-Staff meetings with hundreds of participants, including presentations and breakout rooms in person and online

• Meetings for high-stakes participants — e.g., the Board of Trustees (22), President’s Office (45), and faculty meetings (9)

In addition to providing AV support for all classes at the College, we upgraded multiple systems and tools in many classrooms and event spaces, as well as in the President’s office. We also provided guidance and support for AV in the renovated Toddler Center.

OBSERVATIONS

A few high-level takeaways from this year:

• As with last year, we see that our services, collections, and collaborations must be offered in multiple modes for the indefinite future. We must plan for the costs of supporting access to digital collections, physical storage of growing print collections, technology to support hybrid teaching, meetings, and events, and flexible spaces for study, teaching, meeting, and offices to prepare for this future.

• Our physical spaces remain heavily used, with reservable study spaces filled more than 90% of available time. The new Student Engagement Librarian will be working to build our understanding of student needs and possible new requests for BLAIS spaces.

• Our student-facing colleagues need to be available both in person and online, so continuing to offer flexible work environments and scheduling is crucial.

• The sudden widespread use of generative AI has raised questions that touch all that we do: What technologies should we support? What risks are there in entering librarylicensed content into AI systems? How can we provide sufficient understanding of the place of AI in the research information environment? and many more. We are engaged with many others on the campus and at Columbia to address these challenges.

Center for Engaged Pedagogy

Center for Engaged Pedagogy

BARNARD COLLEGE

OVERVIEW

The Center for Engaged Pedagogy (CEP) strengthens Barnard’s deep academic engagement and support for student, faculty, and community well-being. To bolster this mission, we offer programming on teaching and learning topics; develop and share pedagogical scholarship; build and sustain relationships within and beyond Barnard; and provide tools and resources to the campus community. Our goal is to prepare Barnard to critically engage with and contribute to our ever-changing world.

The CEP serves as a hub for student learning and support at all levels of Barnard curriculum by providing student tutorials on learning strategies, student learning communities exploring the use of new technologies and relevant pedagogical topics, and holistic programming aimed at supporting the whole student. For faculty, the CEP facilitates institutes, communities of practice, workshops, and public lectures on topics such as anti-oppressive teaching practices, course design, the use of digital tools in face-to-face and online classroom instruction, active learning strategies, and assessment. The CEP also offers one-on-one consultations, teaching observations, and assessment services for classroom instruction.

Data Highlights GENERAL SUMMARY OF THE YEAR

33,439

total pageviews across all CEP webpages (compared with 28,687 in 2021-2022)

1,974

total participants across all CEP events and programs (compared with 1,775 in 2021-22)

1,336

unique individuals across all CEP events and programs (compared with 491 in 2021-22)

1,065

unique Barnard students across all CEP events and programs, or 33% of student population

144 unique Barnard faculty members across all CEP events and programs, or 37% of faculty population

95% of respondents, or 60 respondents, indicated that they would recommend CEP to a colleague or peer on the 2022-23 CEP Impact Survey

Faculty reflection on changes to teaching as a result of CEP programming

“I am more open as an instructor and not as dictatorial. I have more confidence in being able to work with whatever students bring to me. The CEP and especially the feedback it brings me from students in general has made me a more effective, less traditional teacher. The classroom is more of a collaborative space now.”

—Faculty respondent on CEP ’22-’23 Impact Survey

CEP student interns and fellows sharing feedback on digital assignments at the Thinking Digitally Summer Institute in May 2023

CEP 2022-23 Annual Goals

 Deepen research on the shifting needs of anti-oppressive pedagogy and develop durable programming, resources, and projects that connect those needs to emergent campus-wide initiatives on climate, trans inclusion, and reproductive justice.

 Expand existing services offered by the CEP (for example, Student Learning Assessment Fellows) and make current services more visible to the College community (for example, teaching observations).

 Cultivate new audiences within and beyond the College by updating, revising, and promoting our resources through targeted outreach and partnerships.

 Continue to establish the physical space of the CEP as a hub for intellectual stimulation, pedagogical collaboration, and community building.

This year, the Center for Engaged Pedagogy looked back on the past and forged new relationships for the future during a year of leading through change and transition.

 We celebrated the 5th annual Barnard Bold Conference on Friday, March 31, with 12 wide-ranging, in-person sessions and a keynote conversation featuring the conference’s founder, Shreya Sunderram ’19, with Professors Thea Abu El-Haj and María Rivera Maulucci.

 We expanded our outreach efforts and impact through a required NSOP session for students, workshops for student research programs (Mellon Mays and Bridgewater), and an Inclusive Teaching Drive during Queer History Month with visits to three academic department meetings (Theatre, English, and Psychology).

 We deepened our research on anti-oppressive pedagogy to align with emergent campuswide initiatives on climate, trans inclusion, and reproductive justice, including:

 our Climate Co-Teaching Retreat and Workshops for faculty;

 our fourth annual Beyond Content series, with well-attended events (69 participants) featuring Arjun Shankar (Georgetown Anthropology), Kelly Miller (Harvard Physics), and Eugenia Zuroski (McMaster English) on topics ranging from the importance of diversity in team-based learning to alternative grammars of relation in anticolonial pedagogies;

 a workshop for senior staff on LGBTQ+ inclusion at Barnard;

 leading two sessions focused on reproductive justice in our Community of Practice on Anti-Racism;

 creating structure and support for Barnard Bold Conference sessions led by Barnard staff, faculty, and students on the trans student experience (in collaboration with Dylan Kapit ’16, LGBTQ+ Outreach Coordinator), the role of “feeling” in climate teaching, and the development of an Asian American/Asian Diaspora minor.

 We tapped into our expertise in research, collaboration, and facilitation to provide leadership on generative AI in the classroom, resulting in a:

 teaching resource (published January 2023) in collaboration with IMATS;

 faculty-wide presentation on the implications of generative AI in teaching (March 2023) in collaboration with Faculty Governance and Procedures (FGP);

 community-wide workshop at the Barnard Bold conference (“Who’s Afraid of ChatGPT”) in collaboration with IMATS and BLAIS; and

 generative AI workshop for faculty on communicating AI policies and positions to students (June 2023).

 We successfully completed a national search for the CEP’s new Executive Director, Dr. Melissa Wright, who stepped into the role on May 1. Dr. Wright brings more than 15 years of experience in assessment, pedagogy, and educational technology. Previously, she was the Senior Associate Director of the CEP and the Associate Director of Assessment & Evaluation at the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature and an M.A. in English, both from the University at Buffalo.

Students, faculty, and staff discussing motivations for using ChatGPT at a Barnard Bold Conference workshop

Faculty and staff in the CEP discussing their co-taught climate courses and units

ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF 2022-2023

Throughout this year, the CEP has consistently remained aligned with our 2022-23 strategic goals by offering a wide range of meaningful and innovative programming, resources, support, and assessment to faculty, students, and staff across Barnard. A selection of our accomplishments:

Provided Thought Leadership and Opportunities for Community-Wide Discussion on Implications of Generative AI in Teaching and Learning: Given the CEP’s dual mission of supporting both faculty and students and our principles of experimental and inclusive learning, we approached generative AI this past year with an emphasis on dialogue and transparency. In our guide, “Generative AI and the College Classroom,” released in midJanuary 2023, we encouraged faculty to have conversations with students about their potential reasons for drawing on these AI products and to think critically and experimentally about the possibility of integrating AI into their courses. We collaborated with BLAIS and IMATS to host a community conversation on ChatGPT during our 5th annual Barnard Bold Conference and led a faculty-wide presentation at a March 2023 faculty meeting as well as a generative AI syllabus statement workshop in June 2023 for faculty to discuss and gain deeper insight into generative AI products, to reflect on them, and to prepare for Fall 2023. We also engaged in extensive dialogue as a Center: as a team; with colleagues in IMATS, BLAIS, BCIT, the Computational Science Center and the Provost’s Office; and with our Faculty and Student Advisory Committees. We argued early on that the future of AI will involve more transparent and ethical use — both in terms of citation and acknowledgement of AI-enabled writing or coding and robust analyses of the biases that these technologies can reproduce.

Deepened Reach and Engagement in Student Programming: The CEP has continued to strengthen our student outreach and engagement through our ongoing student programming and our participation in facilitating NSOP sessions. Noteworthy for this past year, the CEP was invited to hold a required NSOP session, “Starting Strong: Tools & Strategies for Academic Engagement,” for all incoming first-year and transfer students (~859 students). Throughout the year, we drew on the expertise of our undergraduate student interns to provide both instructional and casual programming responsive to the needs of students. These include workshops on relevant academic skills, such as notetaking, goal-setting, class participation, and time management, as well as drop-in study sessions at the CEP. The high volume of student participation and positive reception to these offerings underscore the CEP’s commitment to deepening student reach and engagement across campus in support of the student academic experience at Barnard.

Expanded Student-Facing Workshops and Resources: The CEP expanded the topics of its student-facing workshops and, in the course of doing so, strengthened its connections with campus partners. For example, in collaboration with the New Pathways Bridgewater Scholars Program, we hosted a workshop on strategies for finding and maintaining relationships with mentors. In collaboration with the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program, we hosted a workshop on how to make the best use of office hours during one’s junior and senior years. At the same time that the CEP explored new topics in its student-facing workshops, it also created and distributed related resources in novel forms. The most notable example was the conversion of this workshop into both a full-length resource on the CEP site and a social media campaign, coordinated with Access Barnard, that provided high-level guidance on attending office hours.

Developed Infrastructural Capacity to Support Educational Research Grants and Provided Leadership on Curricular Grant Applications: As part of our ongoing role co-administering our NSF IUSE-funded Computing Fellows project, the CEP continued to collect data via interviews, focus groups, surveys, and course evaluations; code the results; and analyze the findings in relation to our overarching research concerns. During the 2022-23 year, we had a poster and one-page paper accepted for publication for the 2023 SIGCSE Technical Symposium on computer science education in which several members of the research team presented our initial findings. As of June 2023, we have prepared and analyzed the new sets of data and have begun drafting a fuller publication submitted this fall.

Over the course of the year, the CEP played a pivotal role in facilitating campus partnerships by leading two large grant applications: the National Endowment for the Humanities’ “Connections” grant and the Mellon Foundation’s “Humanities for All Time” grant. In both cases, the CEP brought together otherwise separated campus entities (such as the Office of Sustainability and Climate Action and the faculty coordinators of the Environmental Humanities Minor & Concentration, among others) to form research teams that articulated ambitious plans for campus-wide pedagogical initiatives. The CEP also served as a leader within these teams, organizing the drafting process of the applications and managing the logistical aspects of these proposals that would make the plans feasible. Such collaborations not only deepened the CEP’s reputation as an incubator of partnerships but also demonstrated our contributions to research and planning related to special topics — in this case, pedagogy on climate change and sustainability.

“As a new faculty member at Barnard College teaching courses in cognitive neuroscience, I found the Center for Engaged Pedagogy (CEP) to be an invaluable resource. CEP’s mid-semester feedback sessions helped me better understand and address my students’ needs in both my seminars and lecture course. Overall, discussing student feedback from the CEP evaluations in my class improved communication with my students and made it easier for them to express their interests and concerns regarding the course.”

—Luca Iemi, Term Assistant Professor, Neuroscience & Behavior

Piloted Student Learning Assessment Fellows Program: In July 2022, the CEP collaborated with the Office of Institutional Research & Assessment (now Institutional Effectiveness) and Access Barnard to offer a summer learning community on student learning assessment for 11 Barnard students. Students gained exposure to research and practical approaches to equity and learning assessment. Five of the 11 students then went on to serve as inaugural Student Learning Assessment Fellows, conducting mid-semester check-ins for faculty, providing feedback on instructor’s assignments during the 2023 Thinking Digitally Summer Institute, and facilitating student focus groups to support the Foundations Curriculum Review process. Read more about the July 2022 learning community at https://barnard.edu/news/ student-observer-solution.

Supported Collaboration and Reflection on Faculty Approaches to Teaching Qualitative Methods: Working with faculty who have identified qualitative research methods as an area in need of support services from Barnard’s centers, the CEP helped draft and distribute a survey to faculty across the social sciences in order to understand the broader experiences and challenges in teaching qualitative research methods across departments. Forty faculty members completed the survey across 15 departments, with the majority of respondents representing Anthropology, Sociology, and Urban Studies. Through initial analysis of the data, the CEP identified ethics in community-engaged research as an area of focus for the ’23-’24 school year. This analysis has led to ongoing work with interested faculty members to identify areas where the CEP’s mission overlaps with the needs of faculty in teaching qualitative research methods.

Signature & Innovative Programming

In addition to our recurring programming, including New Faculty Orientation, the Beyond Content Series, and our signature workshops for students (“Visualizing Goals” and “Joy and Science of Note Taking”), we experimented with the following innovative programming in 2022-23:

Radical Pedagogies Book Launch & Workshop: The CEP collaborated with Professor Ignacio G. Galán (Architecture) to host more than 75 students, faculty, and staff under the tent on Futter Field for the Radical Pedagogies Book Launch & Workshop on September 30. We welcomed book editors (Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, Beatriz Colomina, and Anna-Maria Meister), contributors (Brian Goldstein and Iván L. Munuera), and historians and archivists (Frank Guridy and Jocelyn K. Wilk) to campus to discuss the history of protest, education, and architecture and to reflect on sites of protest in our community’s own history.

Climate Co-Teaching Retreat & Workshop Series: We joined forces with the Office of Sustainability & Climate Action and First-Year Seminar to host a Climate Co-Teaching Retreat & Workshop series, pooling the collective knowledge and wisdom of 18 faculty participants from nine departments.

Queer Pedagogy Working Group: In Spring 2023, the CEP Faculty Fellow Duygu Oya Ula and Associate Director of the CEP Alex Pittman inaugurated the Queer Pedagogy Working Group, which aims to create a space where faculty and other student-facing members of the staff can come together to talk through the particularities, joys, tensions, and challenges of the intersection of queerness and pedagogy. The monthly meetings for Spring 2023 focused on current issues, such as queer mentorship on college campuses, trans and queer inclusion in the classroom, and trans admissions policies in women’s colleges. The working group reached 13 faculty and staff members from 10 distinct departments and unit.

Collaborations with Students for Health Education, Access, and Literacy (S-HEAL): In Spring 2023, the CEP and the Office of Community Engagement & Inclusion collaborated in response to a request from Students for Health Education, Access, and Literacy (S-HEAL), a Barnard and Columbia student group that offers health education classes to New York City high school. We hosted two presentations on how to design and lead effective, inclusive workshops for S-HEAL. We engaged 113 student participants across both events.

Key Collaborations Within & Outside Barnard

The CEP regularly collaborates with departments within both the Provost’s Office and the DEI Division. In addition to recurring collaborations with the DHC, IMATS, and other Milstein centers on offerings like the Thinking Digitally Summer Institute, this year we also collaborated with BLAIS and IMATS on approaching the possibilities and risks of generative AI in teaching and learning. Other important collaborations included our work on Climate CoTeaching with the Office of Sustainability & Climate Action and First-Year Seminar; our work with CARDS on faculty support for accommodations, which resulted in a Disability Week workshop for faculty and revised faculty support; our work with Community Engagement and Inclusion on a workshop that explored experiential learning in K-12 settings; and a collaboration with Access Barnard to create visual resources for students. These resources, made available on Instagram, addressed student-oriented topics like how to prepare for office hours (77 likes) and how to build relationships with professors (100 likes).

In addition to our internal collaborations, the CEP also hosted Swarthmore College’s new Director of Teaching & Learning Commons, Professor Elaine Allard, for a daylong tour of the Milstein centers. This wonderful opportunity to share our work with a director of a new center came about after Brian Goldstein, faculty in Art History at Swarthmore, participated in our Radical Pedagogies event and encouraged Prof. Allard to to learn more about the exciting work happening at the CEP. Our Executive Director also traveled to Iowa in June 2023 for a two-day workshop at Grinnell College on student-faculty pedagogical partnership, where she made meaningful and strategic connections with faculty, students, and staff at peer institutions to inform the growth of the CEP’s own student-faculty pedagogical partnership program.

OBSERVATIONS

One of the essential lessons we learned concerned the kinds of programming that are most effective for faculty and students. When the pandemic was at its height, and faculty and students were working remotely, our communities of practice were one of the main ways that we built relationships. Our community of practice on anti-racism, for example, had 18 faculty participants and was cited by instructors as an important space of knowledgesharing and camaraderie during the 2020-2021 academic year. But as the College transitioned back to in-person instruction, and as our programming started to compete with people’s commute times and other events, our communities of practice saw a decline in participation. Conversations with previous faculty participants and a discussion with our faculty advisory board revealed instructors’ clear desire for more opportunities to talk about pedagogy with their colleagues in standalone events. Instructors’ preference for oneoff programs was also corroborated by the popularity of already existing programming like the Bold conference and the Beyond Content speaker series. Similarly, our collaborations with Francesca Ochoa, Term Lecturer in First-Year Writing, on student perceptions of grading were self-contained events that faculty reported valuing.

The flipside to this lesson about providing less intensive forms of programming, however, is that we learned about the effectiveness of reaching both students and faculty through required orientation events. This is particularly applicable to new faculty and first-year and transfer students. An example of this is the series of presentations that the CEP did as part of the New Student Orientation Program and New Faculty Orientation in August 2022. These presentations and workshops, which exposed all incoming students and faculty to the CEP, proved to be a boon to our efforts to raise awareness of our resources and services.

The Design Center

Design Center

BARNARD COLLEG E

OVERVIEW

The Design Center is an incubator for creative making and embodied learning located on the entry level of the Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning. We’re an open and inclusive studio space for hands-on experimentation with materials, tools, and equipment. We support the design and fabrication of objects as well as the pedagogy and learning associated with making.

Our team is committed to addressing design justice, sustainability, and inclusivity in the fabric of our programming and our operational framework. The Center provides equitable access to design technologies and empowers members of the Barnard community to discover, experiment with, and pilot new technologies and design practices.

Incorporating a broad tool set that includes computer-aided design tools, power tools, and hand tools, the Design Center expands opportunities for design-centered thinking across the Barnard College curriculum and with our local community partners. Our programs and workshops address foundational making techniques, sustainable design practices, and the powerful ways in which designed and constructed objects impact our lives. The Design Center enables students, faculty, and staff of all skill levels to learn and apply practical making skills in their design projects through experiential, community-based learning.

Our service model:

• All new users are required to complete a one-time Safety Orientation to work in the Design Center.

• We hold Open Hours 7 days a week in which community members can utilize the Design Center.

• Getting Started workshops train participants to use our most popular tools.

• We work with faculty to offer course support, integrating design projects into their courses and hosting group Safety Orientations, class sessions, and tool training in the Design Center.

• We offer in-depth project-based workshops guiding participants through a design project.

• We offer Design Talks with guest speakers who lead workshops showcasing innovative practices around art, design, and technology.

• Community engagement: We partner with organizations within and beyond Barnard to host workshops and events.

GENERAL SUMMARY OF THE YEAR

The Design Center increased Open Hours (adding Mondays) and is now open seven days a week. We served 849 total new users — 390 in fall, 385 in spring, 74 in summer — a 12% increase from last year. There were 5,391 total user entries (including Safety Orientations) — 2,100 in fall, 2,931 in spring, 360 in summer — a 31% increase from the previous year.

Our Getting Started sessions hosted 421 participants across 91 sessions, offering information on how to get started with sewing, embroidery, electronics, CNC (carving), laser cutting, 3D printing, and screenprinting.

The center offered course support for seven classes, conducted 12 project-based workshops, hosted three design talks, facilitated nine collaborations across centers and student organizations, and conducted six community engagement events. All of these offerings are detailed below.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF 2022-2023

We track all the visitors to the Design Center as they enter the space, and one measure of success is the total number of visits. In academic year 2022-2023, the Design Center had a record-high 5,391 visits to the space, a 31% increase over the previous year. We also safety-trained 849 new users, a 12% increase over the previous year. We hosted a wide range of academic support and programming, outlined below. Highlights include increasing the number of faculty and courses we worked with, expanding the menu of project-based workshops we developed and offered, and collaborating with a wider network of programs and organizations.

Academic Support

• Irena Haiduk’s Buoyancy class held sessions in the Design Center for sewing machine and serger training as well as to work on their projects.

• Kaeli Streeter’s Design Futures class came to the Design Center for a bookbinding workshop and ongoing support with their portfolio projects. Design Center coordinator Rebecca Naegele gave students feedback in their final critique at the end of the semester.

• Mark Santolucito’s Creative Embedded Systems class came to the Design Center for a group Safety Orientation followed by a soldering tutorial for their electronics assignment. Students continued working toward their assignment at the Design Center throughout the semester with support from staff.

• Seth Cluett’s Building Sound class at the Computer Music Center came to the Design Center for a group Safety Orientation and ongoing project support throughout the semester. Students designed and built musical instruments incorporating multiple fabrication and audio technologies.

• Brian Mailloux’s Environmental Measurements class came to the Design Center for 3D printing training and support with 3D modeling software. Students designed and 3D printed custom shovels to use in their field work.

• Sandra Goldmark’s Costume Design class utilized the Design Center to work on assignments. Design Center Coordinator Rebecca Naegele attended multiple course sessions to present on circularity in art, design, and sustainable material references and also participated in project feedback sessions.

• Erika Kitzmiller’s educational studies thesis class held their final class session at the Design Center for a bookbinding workshop. Students each bound their thesis papers into books.

• The Digital Humanities Center in partnership with the Center for Engaged Pedagogy, IMATS, and the Barnard Library presented the Thinking Digitally Summer Institute. In this series, faculty investigate the theories, ethics, and praxis of digital pedagogy. Through workshops, discussions, and an intensive institute, faculty develop and redesign courses to engage critically with technology. The Design Center created a Canvas module for faculty to engage with during TDSI, outlining how the technologies at the Design Center could be incorporated into curriculums. The module also included a tutorial on 3D scanning for 3D printing.

Workshops and Events

Reusable Bag Making

Wood Repair Workshop

Choose Your Own Adventure: Topographical Maps

In this workshop, participants were introduced to the sewing machine and learned how to sew reusable bags.

Mike Banta, Director of Production in the Barnard Theatre Department, instructed participants on how to do basic repairs on wooden items. This workshop is part of the Design Center’s Repair Workshop Series, an initiative begun in collaboration with Barnard Sustainability.

Post-Bacc Fellow Mary Clare Greenlees led a workshop on topographical maps as part of their post-bacc research project. Using the laser cutter, participants explored different ways to visualize topographical maps from remote-sensing data of Earth and Mars.

Mycelium Fabrication

Hardcover Book Binding

In this two-part workshop led by Rebecca Naegele and Jess Saldaña, participants learned techniques for mold making and casting with mycelium. Participants learned the principles of these sustainable making techniques and created functional design and art objects.

Participants learned the fundamentals of hardcover bookbinding, including how to assemble a text block and cover, sew a text block, and create book cloth using recycled linen.

Halloween Event

Rug Tufting with the Natural World Collaging Workshop

The Design Center hosts an annual Halloween event in which participants create Halloween costumes and accessories. This year, we also collaborated with Sustainability’s DIY costume-making contest.

Inspired by the work of textile artist Alexandra Kehayoglou, Mary Clare Greenlees led a workshop demonstrating the practice of rug tufting, including how to use a punch needle.

Inspired by the work of artist Judy Bowman, undergraduate staff member Khepera Lyons-Clark led a workshop on collage techniques. Participants were encouraged to experiment with texture, color, and creative ways of creating an image from other images.

Clothing Repair Workshop

Biomimicry Design Workshop

End-of-Year Showcase

Participants brought in clothing that needed repair and learned mending techniques, including how to sew a button, darn a sock, sew a hem, fix a zipper, and patch a hole.

Participants were given a tour of the Barnard Greenhouse by Nick Gershberg and identified plant properties to inspire biomimicry design ideation. Participants learned the principles of 3D scanning and then experimented with different tools and making techniques in the Design Center based on their plant explorations.

The Design Center Showcase celebrates some of the outstanding work created by center users. The space is transformed into a gallery of student work. This year, our Post-Bacc Fellow Mary Clare Greenlees presented their yearlong research project, “Pedagogy and Making: Using College Makerspaces as a Tool for Earth and Planetary Science Education.”

Design Talks

Back-Strap Weaving Using Zero Waste Fabrics

Designing the Fungal City

The founder and director of Weaving Hand, Cynthia Alberto, taught a workshop on back-strap weaving that introduced participants to the history of back-strap weaving, an ancient yet globally practiced tradition. Using modern back-strap looms, participants created woven projects with an emphasis on sustainable, zero-waste weaving.

This talk and Q&A presented by Vanessa Harden explored how mycorrhizal networks and plant connectivity can be beneficial to the design of urban ecosystems.

Healthy Building: Carbon and Chemicals

Cristina Handal and Alison Mears of the Parsons Healthy Materials Lab led a workshop exploring the connections between embodied carbon, chemicals, and design materials to demonstrate how participants can incorporate this knowledge into their future design work.

Collaborations with Centers and Student Organizations

GIS Day

Lunar New Year Celebration

As part of the GIS Day event organized by the Empirical Reasoning Center, the Design Center hosted GIS-Daythemed making activities, including laser-cutting NYC map keychains, silkscreening tote bags, button making, and more.

To celebrate the Lunar New Year, the Student Government Association (SGA) organized a Chinese Calligraphy Workshop that was hosted in the Design Center. Professor Hailong Wang presented his own research and art and taught more than 50 participants how to use ink with a calligraphy brush.

Resident Assistant Team

Building Event

Tactile Topography

The Design Center partnered with the Athena Center and Barnard Archives to host a workshop highlighting the importance of physical ephemera in protest movements today and in the past. After viewing relevant ephemera in the Barnard Archives, participants learned how to ideate and materialize designs centered on reproductive justice. Participants created original collaborative designs using Design Center technologies and translated them to historically relevant material forms, including T-shirts, buttons, posters, and tote bags.

RA Christina Duan approached the Design Center to organize a team building event for the Resident Assistants of 620. Participants learned the process of water marbling to create intricate pigmented patterns on paper.

The ERC and Design Center hosted a workshop that taught participants the process of translating data into 3D maps. They first learned how to use Blender, a free, open-source software, to import and model their mapping data in the ERC and then came to the Design Center to learn how to fabricate their maps with 3D printing and laser cutting.

Designathon Workshop

Dye Sublimation Session

Student leaders of the Barnard + Columbia Architecture Society approached the Design Center to host a workshop session for participants of their weekend-long Designathon. This workshop included a group Safety Training as well as a demonstration of model-making skills.

Professor Kate Turetsky brought the students working in her lab for a group demonstration of the dye sublimation process as a celebratory team-building activity.

SAAM Screenprinting

Screenprinting Session

Community Engagement

STEAM in the City, CEI and Sustainability

Being Barnard approached the Design Center to host a screenprinting event as part of their programming for Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Over 50 students screenprinted tote bags.

To celebrate the end of the year, the Barnard and Columbia Architecture Department participated in a screenprinting event.

Scholastic Zine Fair, hosted by Barnard Zine Library

The Design Center hosted a professional development workshop for Harlem educators as part of the ongoing STEAM in the City program. Participants learned composting principles and built vermicompost bins for classroom indoor composting systems.

The Design Center showcased zines focusing on sustainability and ecology themes from recent workshops and programming (mycelium fabrication, repair, biomimicry design, etc.) alongside some related prototypes and material samples.

Barnard Family Weekend

Good Morning America segment

Barnard Architecture + Design Summer Institute

The Design Center was open to parents to showcase our tools and programming.

Barnard’s Circularity efforts, including Sustainability’s Give and Go Green initiative and the Design Center’s Repair Workshops, were featured on Good Morning America. This news segment was organized by Sandra Goldmark and Mike Banta and hosted in the Design Center. Rebecca Naegele was interviewed by Ginger Zee on the Design Center’s repair programming workshops and demonstrated clothing repair techniques.

Led by Barnard architecture faculty, this three-week program includes on-campus learning and making in the architecture design studio, computer lab, and the Barnard Design Center, as well as field trips throughout the city to see design offices, construction projects, and exhibitions. This program supports low-income high school students from the local community, offering young women from underrepresented groups the opportunity to explore architecture and design.

STEAM in the City, Summer Session

The Design Center hosted multiple sessions throughout the week of STEAM in the City, including a Safety Training, Design Challenge, and bookmaking session for math and geology education.

Participants

were given a tour of Barnard's Arthur Ross Greenhouse by director Nick Gershberg and identified plant properties to inspire biomimicry design ideation.

OBSERVATIONS

Over the past year, the Design Center has witnessed a surge in activity and participation, with 5,391 total entries recorded, a 31% increase over the prior year. To accommodate the expanding user base, the center piloted extending its operating hours to all seven days of the week (it had been open six days per week). The additional availability on Mondays was well utilized by students, and many expressed appreciation for the new schedule.

With increased usership came a set of unique challenges. We observed a heightened demand for specific tools, most notably the laser cutter. We therefore introduced a streamlined booking system for the laser cutter, which has helped with evenly distributing demand during weekends and evenings. We are currently exploring a ratio-based system as another method for responding to increased usership, in which our capacity (users in the space) is flexibly determined by the number of available staff at a given time throughout the week.

The growth in users also made it increasingly difficult to support spontaneous, on-demand tool training for students. In response, we significantly increased the frequency of our “Getting Started” training sessions, allowing for a more efficient transfer of knowledge to our students. In moments when staff were not available to provide in-depth tool training on the spot, we were able to refer students to our “Getting Started” series for further support.

The Design Center was one of the reasons I applied to Barnard. The accessibility of the space and the sustainability initiatives are such a wonderful opportunity for students to be more intentional in what they create and own.”

— Claire Burke, First-Year, Intended major: Comparative Literature and Human Rights

Empirical Reasoning Center

Empirical Reasoning Center

BARNARD COLLEG E

OVERVIEW

Launched in January 2013, the Empirical Reasoning Center (ERC) supports the College’s initiative to embed empirical reasoning across the undergraduate curriculum. By empirical reasoning, we mean “thinking critically with data” of all kinds — quantitative, qualitative and geospatial. It is, we believe, another form of literacy on par with reading and writing. At the most basic level, it embraces the capacity to comprehend and evaluate varied empirical arguments/evidence and to write cogently with data. On a more advanced level, it encompasses the successive steps in developing and carrying out an independent research project, including the formulation of an empirical question; specification of the appropriate methods of analysis; collection, production, and analysis of the relevant data; and interpretation and presentation of the results.

To this end, the ERC provides students and faculty with a variety of data analysis services, notably (but not exclusively) for courses satisfying the “Thinking Quantitatively and Empirically” and “Thinking Technologically and Digitally” requirements of the Foundations curriculum. ERC staff collaborate with faculty in developing curricular content for their courses and corresponding instructional workshops. To assist students with workshop content and empirical assignments, ERC operates a drop-in help desk staffed by undergraduate fellows and graduate assistants and maintains a catalog of instructional webpages and digital recordings of workshops. While workshops are most often taught in conjunction with curricular innovations, the center also offers open workshops to provide an introduction to various data analysis tools, such as basic data literacy, Excel, R, and QGIS. And it also organizes workshops and events tailored to meet students’ more specialized research and professional interests.

More recently, the ERC has expanded its scope to encompass the entire Barnard and wider Morningside Heights and Harlem communities. For example, within the Barnard community, staff have worked closely with the Athena Center, Beyond Barnard, Institutional Research, and Human Resources to incorporate systematic empirical analysis into the daily and professional lives of students as well as the work of the College at large. Independently and through the “Barnard Engages” initiative, ERC staff works with nonprofit organizations in our vicinity to bolster their social justice missions. Finally, the ERC, often in collaboration with other centers, has expanded its programming (e.g., forums, panel discussions) on current, vital issues such as data ethics.

GENERAL SUMMARY OF THE YEAR

After disruptions due to the pandemic, we have successfully revived our traditional service model consisting of an in person walk-in help desk staffed by undergraduate fellows and graduate assistants. We continue to work with faculty to teach workshops for courses, and we offer open workshops available to the entire Barnard community. The walk-in desk and the course support we provide continue to be our first priority at the center.

Notably, the hiring of more full-time staff has been instrumental in the center’s ability to provide better support for not only the students we help but also the students that we employ, allowing for more one-on-one meetings with undergraduate fellows during the semester as well as a more robust summer internship program.

To ensure the effectiveness of our services and to stay up to date with current hybrid modes of teaching and learning, we made upgrades to the lab space to make it a more effective teaching and collaborative space. We installed new computers for students, a new system to allow students and faculty to broadcast their work directly to our LED screens from their laptops, and a new screen to replace the old projector system to improve legibility and image clarity.

In addition, we celebrated our 10th anniversary this year, which provided a crucial moment of reflection on the founding principles of the center and our vision moving forward. It was clear from the panel of students and faculty who spoke at the event that the Center provides an indispensable service to the College through curricular support, our walkin desk, and internships. In the past few years, we’ve also added critical conversations on data to our collection of services. Through these events, discussions, and more, we demonstrated the ways in which data and empirical thinking can serve as an entry point to various important social, economic, political, and environmental questions.

In the coming year, the ERC hopes to take the lead in driving these conversations at the College by continuing to improve our walk-in desk and course workshops, which equip students to be able to think critically about the world through data, while also continuing to offer events that pull in speakers, industry specialists, librarians, and other Barnard centers in order to inspire new methods of thinking and practice.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF 2022-2023

10-Year Anniversary Event

One of the standout achievements of the year was the successful execution of our 10year anniversary event. With meticulous planning and dedicated efforts, we organized a memorable celebration that brought together various faculty, staff, and students who have contributed to our journey. The event drew over 50 enthusiastic attendees, representing a diverse cross-section of our community.

The event featured two panels with students and faculty who talked about their experiences working with the ERC across a variety of projects and courses. Faculty members emphasized the ways in which the ERC filled important gaps in their students’ knowledge and skills, allowing students to push their work further over the course of a semester. Students spoke about how the ERC’s walk-in desk and lab environment allowed them to ease the steep learning curve of working with data and relieve their anxieties around learning new softwares and programming languages.

As our keynote speaker, we had the honor of hosting Dr. Miriam Posner, assistant professor of information studies and digital humanities at UCLA, who shared her insight and experiences, inspiring attendees to think critically about data, its etymology, and the assumptions embedded within it. At the event, we also launched our digital book display, curated in collaboration with Barnard Library and Academic Information Services (BLAIS), which focused on the crucial theme of data justice. The display featured 20 selected books that delve into the intricate relationships between data and power. Organized into four critical themes — algorithms and data bias, examples of work using data for justice, surveillance and privacy, and framing and history — the display provided a foundation for community members interested in learning more about equity and responsibility in our digital age.

Impactful Workshops

Throughout the year, our team continued to support courses across the College, ranging from Physics and Chemistry to Classics and Ancient Studies and Architecture. Some notable course workshops from this past year include a workshop series we ran for Professor Katherine Krimmel’s class on Public Opinion and Democracy. We held a series of nine workshops that covered the entire spectrum of data analysis in the R programming language. Starting from setting up the environment, participants were guided through the intricacies of data analysis, interpretation, and visualization. This “from scratch” approach provided instruction to students in digestible increments, allowing them to build confidence, and by the end of the course they were able to access, manipulate, and visualize data for a deeper understanding of our democratic processes and policies.

Another successful course workshop series was for Professor Ellen Morris’ course on the Ancient Mediterranean. The workshop series focused on digitizing historic maps and documents through GIS. We utilized a flipped classroom approach, in which students were asked to watch recorded workshops and attempt to complete an assignment on their own before meeting in the lab for a Q&A session to troubleshoot issues that they encountered while working on their own. This allowed the students to go through the tutorials at their own pace and for us to answer commonly asked questions as a group so that students could learn from their classmates’ mistakes.

In addition to the courses we supported, we opened up workshops to the rest of the community. We held multiple workshops on data management and analysis for staff across the College. Outside of Barnard, we held a workshop on creating digital walking tours in Mapbox for the Youth Public History Institute and participated in the NYC Open Data conference, presenting a workshop on data analysis in R and garnering positive feedback from peers.

Collaborative Partnerships

We continued to foster valuable collaborations that amplify our impact and broaden our ability to engage with students in critical discourse. We forged strategic partnerships with centers across the college, enhancing our capabilities and expanding our reach.

Together with the Vagelos Computational Science Center, we hosted a two-part event that resonated strongly with our commitment to data-driven storytelling and innovative data visualization techniques. We invited a distinguished speaker from The Pudding, a renowned digital publisher specializing in data journalism for storytelling. This session offered attendees a unique perspective on weaving data into narratives, enriching their understanding of the intersection between data and communication. Building on the insights shared by the speaker, our Senior AD Fatima Koli ’17 held a workshop on creative interactive data visualizations for the web. This hands-on experience allowed students to delve deeper into the concepts discussed and equipped them with practical skills for creating captivating data visualizations like those created by the speaker.

In another collaboration with the Design Center, we hosted a full-day workshop that taught students how to use Blender, an open source 3D modeling software, to pull and manipulate data in order to build a 3D topographic map. We started the day in the ERC lab working with Blender — learning the basics of 3D modeling, downloading/ loading topographic data, manipulating that data in Blender and then exporting it to be fabricated. The second half of the day was spent in the Design Center, where with the support of the Design Center staff, students 3D printed and laser-cut their topographies. This tactile approach to data visualization inspired students to think outside the box and introduced valuable skills in 3D modeling and fabrication.

This year, we also formed significant interdisciplinary research collaborations. We partnered with the Environmental Science Department on a National Science

Foundation (NSF) grant. This partnership aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a new program launched this year. Through a comprehensive process involving surveys, interviews, observation, and rigorous qualitative analysis, we not only contributed to the advancement of their program but also expanded our own abilities in the realm of qualitative research and program evaluation.

Additionally, ERC graduate assistant Lindsey Weiskopf supported Professor Gergely Baics as a research assistant. Her work focused on two main areas. In the fall, she supported Baics’ new course, Spatial History of 19th-Century NYC, which combines thematic lectures with GIS labs at the ERC. Lindsey’s expertise in GIS methods, data analysis, data visualization, and NYC history, along with her commitment to mentoring students, were critical to the class’s success. Lindsey’s second area of work focused on supporting Baics’ two ongoing projects. She conducted data analysis and visualization for Baics’ research on mid-19th-century NYC’s commercial geography; the project was presented at the 2022 SSHA conference. She also worked with Baics on a big data project (c. 8 million entries) involving the cleaning, restructuring, and geocoding of NYC city directories (1850-1890); the resulting data will be integrated into Baics’ course as teaching material and will support ongoing research.

Projects

The ERC also manages and executes independent projects, which allows our fellows and interns to immerse themselves in hands-on projects that tackle real-world challenges and questions.

This year, we brought back our Summer Internship program, which is one of the main drivers of our project-based work. One team of interns focused on a project examining the intersection of policing and gentrification in New York City. The project provided invaluable experience for the interns working on a research project from start to finish — from conducting a literature review, formulating a research question, and devising a methodology to analyzing and interpreting results.

The second intern team worked on a project that had been put on pause during the pandemic. In 2018, the ERC was contracted by a nonprofit organization in Mississippi to build a public, interactive web mapping tool that visualizes and maps census data broken down by race and gender in Mississippi in conjunction with oral histories from women in the state. The project provided our interns with an opportunity to work on a publicfacing project and challenged them to work through the complexities of interactive web development and interpreting and parsing census data. At the end of the summer, the interns presented their work to the full-time staff at the ERC and will be presenting more formally at an event we will host in the Fall semester to celebrate their work.

Although the summer interns have more hours to devote solely to projects, undergraduate fellows at the center are also encouraged to work on smaller projects during the semester as part of their professional development. In order to provide a platform for this work, we launched the ERC blog, which features projects as well as step-by-step tutorials put together by our fellows. Beyond technical content, our fellows also use the blog to reflect on their learning journeys, offering insights into the process of mastering new skills and technologies.

Additionally, our Post-Bacc Fellow worked on a major project during the academic year. The post-bacc project by Ariana Paul ’22 focused on the relationship between changes in energy production and their socioeconomic and public health effects in U.S. counties from 2010 to 2020. She explored trends in housing prices and lung cancer death rates, categorizing the data according to the operational status of renewable and fossil fuel power plants. Her research aims to contribute to the ongoing energy transition.

OBSERVATIONS

Through conversations with students across the College, we noticed students wanted more tools to publish their data visualization work on the web, making themselves more competitive in the job market. To fill that gap, we focused our efforts this year on learning new tools such as Tableau, Svelte, and Mapbox and designing workshops to share that knowledge with students. These pilot workshops were a success, and we plan to offer them again in the future. Having more staff this year allowed us to innovate and broaden the scope of our work in this way. As data and technology change at a rapid scale, we hope to continue on this trajectory, updating our staff’s skill sets to expand resources and provide even more advanced workshops to students.

This year has been very productive for the ERC, but it has not come without its challenges. In many ways, the center is still reacclimating after the College’s return to inperson teaching. While we had previously relied on word-of-mouth among the student body, remote teaching disrupted student continuity, and we believe that there are now many faculty and students who are unaware of our services. In the next year, we hope to preemptively reach out to specific departments and faculty to offer our services and improve our advertising across the College to increase exposure to students.

Our biggest challenge this year has been balancing our time and energy between services and programming. Before the pandemic, the ERC focused primarily on our services: course workshops, the walk-in desk, and open workshops. During remote learning, a marked decrease in demand for those services led the center to pivot to include more programming, inviting professional speakers and leading timely conversations on data ethics and justice. After our return to in-person teaching, we focused on reestablishing our walk-in desk and updating our workshops to better reflect the needs of the student body. We also attempted to continue our programming, as it provides a niche space to discuss and investigate various timely social, economic, and political questions through data. However, designing and hosting such events has been difficult to do simultaneously with a reestablished walk-in desk. We believe both are critical components of the center but are still figuring out how to divide our efforts between programming and our services. This is an ongoing question that we will have to grapple with in the coming year.

Movement Lab

Movement Lab

BARNARD COLLEG E

OVERVIEW

The Movement Lab is a flexible, multipurpose space for exploration, critical thinking, and creative research at the intersection of movement, performance, science, and emerging technology. Research and exploration into the creative uses of technology can take place in all their varied forms, particularly those related to technology and new media, screendance, virtual reality, motion capture, artificial intelligence, computing, and movement. The lab can function as a screening or new media installation venue; a dance, computing, and performance space; a motion capture studio; and a multidisciplinary facility for collaborative research and practice.

GENERAL SUMMARY OF THE YEAR

During the 2022-2023 academic year, the Movement Lab hosted classes, MeMoSa (Media Movement Salon) events, workshops, installations, and collaborations with departments including Computer Science, Dance, English, Music, and the First-Year Experience. Among the recurring classes hosted at the Movement Lab were ScreenDance: Composition, Human Anatomy and Movement, and Movement Analysis. The Movement Lab also hosted sessions with auxiliary courses in collaboration with professors from the following departments: Computer Science, English, Comparative Literature, French, Music, Dance, and Visual Arts.

The lab’s programming focused on audio and sound art as a result of the PostBaccalaureate Fellow’s interest in visual art, vocal art, and immersive performance. The lab formed new interdepartmental relationships with professors from Barnard and Columbia’s Music, Dance, and Visual Arts departments, and as a result, students and community members gained increased access to MeMoSa events, workshops, and installations that reflected the lab’s interest in audio, sound, and visual art. Highlights from the lab’s interdepartmental collaborations include a singing workshop with Dance faculty and Meredith Monk singer Allison Easter, two live sound process performances hosted by Professor David Adamcyk and his course Techniques of Live Sound, three audio-focused events conducted in collaboration with the Media Center, and a weeklong process-focused MeMoSa series hosted in collaboration with the Barnard Theatre Department, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the South Asia Institute, led by acclaimed visual artist Shahzia Sikander.

MeMoSa: COMMIT! with Kate Ladenheim

The Movement Lab team collaborated with a total of five Artists-in-Residence (AiRs) working in the fields of dance, VR/XR, poetry, and creative technology. The lab also worked with a total of nine Student Artists-in-Residence (SAiRs) throughout the year, providing resources, space, support, and mentorship for them to pursue their creative research and receive critical and engaged feedback on their work. The lab’s AiRs and SAiRs presented their creative research through public installations and process performances that incorporated and engaged with the lab’s space and technology.

The Movement Lab also collaborated with professors from the First-Year Experience, Dance, and English departments who utilized the lab as a classroom space and incorporated the lab’s technology into their pedagogical methods. New this year was an information session and collaboration with First-Year Experience professors. Dance Department classes that took place all semester and that the Movement Lab facilitated were ScreenDance: Composition, Human Anatomy and Movement, and Movement Analysis. These three courses were held at the lab on a recurring basis, and the Movement Lab staff provided tech support for the duration of the courses. Students both in and out of these classes used the lab to complete assignments and create their final projects, receiving mentorship and training on the lab’s technology and resources from the lab staff.

This year, the lab’s first Post-Baccalaureate Fellow, Allison Costa ’19, returned as Coordinator, along with Guy de Lancey as Associate Director and Emma Noelle Buhain ’20 as the new Post-Baccalaureate Fellow. Allison Costa also left at the end of the year to attend a residency at Fabrica, a prestigious arts and communications research institute in Italy. Fabrica is the very same residency that Associate Director Guy de Lancey attended as part of the founding cohort. Faculty director Gabri Christa taught her course Screendance in the fall and worked on a new film while on sabbatical during the Spring 2023 semester.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF 2022-2023

This year, the Movement Lab excelled at increasing and almost doubling its yearly programming, providing time, space, engagement, and technical support for studentdriven projects and creative research. As outlined below, the lab hosted a total of 10 MeMoSa events, six workshops, and five installations. The MeMoSas, workshops, and installations outlined below were planned, coordinated, and supported by the lab staff in conjunction with weekly space bookings made by students, SAiRs, and AiRs. On campus, the lab continued to support the curriculum by providing both space and technical support for the Dance department courses Screendance: Composition, Human Anatomy and Movement, and Movement Analysis. In an effort to expand its outreach and involvement with the greater Barnard/Columbia community, the lab also collaborated with and developed new relationships with professors from Columbia’s School of the Arts and Computer Music Center, including Professors Shelly Silver, David Adamcyk, and Zosha di Castri. As a result of the above, the lab has expanded its profile on campus and more broadly in the wider world of emerging technology and creative practice, gaining a reputation as an incubator for new research and artistic development in the field. Many Lab alums have gone on to achieve both national and international renown in their respective practices.

Recurring Courses Held at the Movement Lab

ScreenDance: Composition — Professor Gabri Christa taught this experiential, hands-on course that required all students to choreograph, dance, and film. The class focused on single-shot filmmaking to promote an understanding of the duet and interaction between

Movement Analysis course with Cecilia Fontanesi

the camera and the dance, enabling students to create a final short film at the end of the course.

Movement Analysis — Professor Cecilia Fontanesi taught this introductory course on the theories and methods of movement analysis, focusing on its application to dance performance and research.

The Movement Lab also provided auxiliary space, support, and opportunities for the following classes:

Computing in Context — Professor Mark Santolucito and his students hosted a live coding event at the lab in which students used code to produce music streamed to a live audience.

Lighting Workshop with Intro to Moving Image: Video, Film & Art — Associate Director Guy de Lancey led a lighting and cinematography workshop as part of Professor Shelly Silver’s course.

World Dance History — A course session was held at the Movement Lab in which the lab staff provided technical sound and projection support for Professor Paul Scolieri and his guest lecturers, students, and visitors.

Advanced Poetry Writing — A course session took place at the Movement Lab in which students wrote and workshopped poems in response to projected visuals curated by the instructor, Professor LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs.

Translating the Animal — Professor Hanna Worthen’s course explored how translation, language, and reason have historically worked together to maintain speciesism. Four separate course sessions took place at the Movement Lab, guest-taught by JoAnna MendlShaw.

Golden Age of Versailles — A session of this French course was hosted at the Movement Lab in which Professor Laurie Postlewate invited a professional violinist to perform in collaboration with her students. The lab staff provided projection and lighting support to create an immersive Versailles backdrop for the class.

First-Year Experience Pedagogy Meeting — The Movement Lab hosted an information session with Barnard’s First-Year Experience professors where they learned about the Movement Lab’s offerings and possibilities for offering hosted courses at the lab.

First-Year Seminar — The Movement Lab staff collaborated with Professor Nathan Gorelick on the creation of two audiovisual installations that enabled his students to present their creative work in response to a film shown in class engaging with apocalyptic themes.

To Upend a World: Abolitionist Poetics — A session of Professor Joey de Jesus’ course was held at the Movement Lab involving creative and technical support from lab coordinator Allison Costa ’19.

Techniques of Live Sound with Professor David Adamcyk

Techniques of Live Sound — Students were required to run live sound for two events as their final practical exam in Professor David Adamcyk’s course: a live concert featuring two musical performers and the lab’s Post-Baccalaureate Fellow’s cumulative MeMoSa event.

Composing for Dance — In Professor Zosha di Castri’s course, student composers developed original works for dance, culminating in a final showing at the lab. The lab staff hosted 1:1 tech meetings that enabled students to develop lighting and projection cues for their pieces.

Artists-in-Residence

Each semester, the Movement Lab’s Artists-in-Residence have the opportunity to develop their work and conduct creative research using the lab’s resources. In exchange, the artists offer a public presentation of their work and provide mentorship to students and community members interested in their creative practice and skills.

Collin Kelly is a 6th-generation Montanan, choreographer, and dancer. He studied at The Royal Winnipeg Ballet School and holds a B.F.A. from the University of Montana.

ORIXA is a mixed-reality speculative world that allows users and audience members to experience different Black womxn narratives. This immersive project explores complex, nuanced, and varied perspectives of the Black womxn experience.

Norah Zuniga Shaw is an internationally recognized artist, performer, and creative director best known for her award-winning digital projects for physical ideas, including Synchronous Objects with William Forsythe.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is a writer, vocalist, performance/sound artist, and the author of Village (Coffee House Press, 2023) and TwERK (Belladonna, 2013).

Kate Ladenheim is a choreographer, media designer, and creative technologist. Her work spans interactive installations, media design, performance, and robotics.

Student Artists-in-Residence

The Student Artist-in-Residence (SAiR) program is intended to support Barnard/ Columbia students as they research new movement technologies by providing space, mentorship, equipment resources, and publishing/performance opportunities. This year, we had a total of nine SAiRs working at the lab. Below, we have outlined examples of MeMoSas, installations, and other events by our SAiRs.

MeMoSas (Media Movement Salons)

MeMoSa, or Media Movement Salon, refers to the European tradition of intellectuals and friends coming together to exchange ideas in salon-style gatherings. Our salons provide an opportunity for SAiRs and AiRs to share their work (in progress or otherwise) and receive creative and engaged feedback. All MeMoSas outlined below were run with technical support from the lab staff.

MeMoSa: Therapy by Collin Kelly and Alexandria Giroux — Using comedy, characterization, dance, and live intuitive spiritual readings, Therapy is an invitation to question the toxic positivity that runs rampant in new-age wellness culture.

MeMoSa: Auspex: Dance Inspired by Bird Mating Rituals by Sarah Yasmine MarazziSassoon — Marazzi-Sassoon hosted a work-in-progress interdisciplinary dance show inspired by the behavior of birds and humans. This show was created in the Movement Lab under the guidance of Guy de Lancey.

MeMoSa: The ORIXA Project by Reese Antoinette and MaryAnn Talavera — ORIXA presented a mixed-reality performance and installation celebrating narratives of the African diaspora.

MeMoSa series: OASIS, an interactive performance ritual by Norah Zuniga Shaw and Livable Futures — Shaw and her collaborators explored their audience participation and transmedia performance ritual practices, developed new immersive elements, and connected with students and community members seeking new pathways into rest and recovery.

The Orixa Project with Reese Antoinette and MaryAnn Talavera

MeMoSa: Preview performance of Village by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs — Diggs performed selections of her new book Village alongside video projections and motion capture visuals created at the lab. The performance was followed by an artist talkback and later premiered at Joe’s Pub (The Public Theater).

MeMoSa: COMMIT! by Artist-in-Residence Kate Ladenheim — In this interactive performance installation involving motion capture and live movement, Ladenheim fell repeatedly while gathering and responding to audience feedback about whether her falls looked committed enough.

Weeklong MeMoSa Series with Shahzia Sikander — Pakistani-American multimedia visual artist Shahzia Sikander collaborated with the Movement Lab, Theatre Department, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and South Asia Institute on this processfocused MeMoSa series.

MeMoSa: Breathing: The Blow in Mind Space by Student Artist-in-Residence Yilin Li — Drawing from her experience in dance and Butoh, Yilin aimed to concretize the idea of breathing in multiple formations and visualize it through virtual reality (VR).

MeMoSa: Journey to Mars With the Rock n Roll Terpsichore by Student Artist-inResidence Liz Radway, in Collaboration with Abby Mankin and Katie Sponenburg — Radway’s MeMoSa explored space, technology, and artificial intelligence through movement, taking the viewer on a journey into a future where sentience and science meet.

MeMoSa: Please Leave Me Alone to Weep and Sing Forevermore by Post-Bacc Fellow Emma Noelle Buhain — Buhain performed four of her original songs arranged for voice, synthesizer, cello, and viola, with accompanying projections illustrating the dream/occult symbolism and personal mythologies she explored through song.

Workshops

These session-based workshops introduce various subjects and can be taken separately or as a series. Led by our Artists-in-Residence, staff, or guest artists, our workshops are the perfect place to learn a new skill, engage with principal ideas and people working at the intersection of arts and technology, and be guided through experiments pushing the boundaries of the Movement Lab’s technology.

Workshop with Collin Kelly — Participants used creative devices to generate content and dive into the surreal. They first explored the improvisational practice of nonstopping as a way to activate the mind/body connection. Using found text, they then combined text and movement to survey the unexpected and idiosyncratic.

Workshop with Allison Easter: Moving With the Voice — Led by Dance adjunct lecturer and Meredith Monk singer Allison Easter, participants stretched their vocal capabilities, learned ensemble techniques, manipulated musical phrases, and created short pieces in small groups. This workshop was conducted in collaboration with Professor Jean-Paul Bjorlin’s Introduction to Vocal Repertoire course in the Music Department.

Workshop: Choreographing with 3D Animation, led by Artist-in-Residence Kate Ladenheim — Participants joined Ladenheim in making choreographies for 3D avatars. This workshop was conducted as a guest lecture in collaboration with the Dance Department’s Designing Immersive Performance course taught by Professor Elisa Davis.

Workshop: Recording & Generating Sounds — In this hands-on workshop about recording and manipulating sound for spatial audio composition in the Media PostProduction Lab, participants learned basic skills relevant to audio software, such as Audacity, Garageband, Hindenburg, and Audition.

Workshop: Experimenting & Composing Spatial Audio — Participants joined the Movement Lab and Media Center for a collaborative spatial composing workshop using interactive hardware.

MeMoSa / Listening Party: Interactive Spatial Audio — The Movement Lab and the Media Center staff hosted an interactive performance and listening party created by the participants of the Spatial Audio workshop series.

Installations

Our modular space provides a wide range of possibilities for artists and encourages them to share their work in a dynamic and innovative way. With immersive projection, lighting, and sound, as well as motion capture and VR, the Movement Lab is well equipped to host multimedia art installations. All installations outlined below were run with technical support from the lab staff.

Gender* in the Archives was a weeklong multimedia installation centering trans voices with the goal of highlighting identity, community, endurance, and joy in an immersive setting. This installation was created in collaboration with the Barnard Archives, with funding support from the Council on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Digital support was provided by the lab’s 2021-2022 Post-Baccalaureate Fellow Noa Rui-Piin Weiss.

COMMIT! by Artist-in-Residence Kate Ladenheim was an interactive performance installation involving motion capture and live movement. Kate Ladenheim fell repeatedly while gathering and responding to audience feedback about whether her falls looked committed enough.

Installation: “they never told us these things” by Student Artist-in-Residence Nami Weatherby — Weatherby brought their research as an Athena Center for Leadership Fellow to the Movement Lab to create a sound installation accompanied by projection mapping technology illuminating the strikingly networked origins and effects of nuclear wastelanding, excavation, and dispossession in different parts of the world.

“everything left unsaid” by Student Artist-in-Residence Grace Li — This installation focused on Li’s experience growing up as a first-generation Chinese-American daughter to two Chinese immigrant parents in Nashua, New Hampshire. Incorporating scans of the family archive, childhood videos, and their own film photography, the installation explored themes of growing up, the unreliability of memory, and family history.

Lion Dance as a Vessel for Joyful Celebration by Student Artist-in-Residence Christina Duan — Duan explored celebration through tradition and heritage using projection, sound, and videography to explore the importance of the lion dance and move beyond the external, public-facing aesthetic to illuminate what it means to be a lion dancer.

Installation: Eye to “I” by Student Artist-in-Residence Chunming Zheng — This installation focused on the living experience of vision-impaired people, featuring Zheng’s own life stories and oral history interview clips. The VR experience was designed to reproduce the world through her eyes and allow the audience to experience life with limited vision. The installation featured a screening of project narrator Joseph Lovett’s documentary Going Blind, followed by an audience talkback and VR viewing.

Stillness Lab

The Stillness Lab was open for one hour every week throughout the Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 semesters. The Stillness Lab served as a space for Barnard community members to just be, reset, and breathe amid their busy academic schedules.

Zines in Stillness — With immersive projection and nature-based white noise, the Movement Lab transformed into a space for stillness and reflection. Participants engaged with a selection of zines on movement, nature, stillness, and technology. This event series was hosted in collaboration with Barnard’s Zine Library and curated by Student Artist-in-Residence Grace Li.

Play Lab by Student Artist-in-Residence Rosie Elliott — During selected Stillness Lab sessions, Rosie Elliott explored the question What does it mean to play? Rosie researched and investigated how play is by nature free and nonproductive.

Student Group Collaborations

CoLab — The student performance group CoLab utilized the Movement Lab as a space for weekly creative research and experimentation, in addition to hosting their final semesterly showcases at the lab. The CoLab Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 showcases featured original, multimedia work by student creators and involved creative and technical support from the lab staff.

Center/Community Collaborations

Barnard Signs the Way: ASL in Theatre, Workshop and Performance led by Sunshine 2.0 from Rochester Institute of Technology — In recognition of Deaf Awareness Week, Barnard Signs the Way hosted a performance, workshop, and panel series with and for Deaf advocates and artists. The event took place at the Movement Lab and was staffed by the Lab’s Post-Baccalaureate Fellows Noa Rui-Piin Weiss and Emma Noelle Buhain.

FLI Library Oral History Listening Party — The Movement Lab hosted a listening party that allowed guests and participants to listen to the FLI Story oral history collection, learn about the FLI Partnership Library, and celebrate being FLI at Columbia and Barnard. Hawa Tunkara ’21 curated this project to collect the stories of first-generation/low-income students through audio interviews, videos, artwork, and more.

Encoding Tech Justice: Ritual #1 Cultivating Technologies of Presence, A Socio(Art!) Technical Approach — This teach-in by Amalia Rosa Mayorga in collaboration with the Digital Humanities Center was enacted upon the audience as part theatre show, part ritual healing circle, and part collaborative art-making class.

Meditation & Sustainable Behavior: A Collaboration With Columbia’s Neuroscience Department — Shulin Zhang, a neurobiology and behavior student at Columbia, hosted an ongoing neuroscience study at the lab involving hourlong meditation and optional EEG recording sessions.

Thinking Digitally Summer Institute — This institute, hosted by the Digital Humanities Center, the Center for Engaged Pedagogy, and IMATS, was a three-day, in-person intensive for faculty to design assignments that critically engage with digital technologies. This year, the Movement Lab’s Coordinator and Creative Research Artist / Technologist, Allison Costa ’19, created a module about designing virtual environments through Mozilla Hubs.

STEM from Dance

Girls Rise Up was a monthlong immersive summer intensive for girls and nonbinary students interested in the intersection of science, math, and dance.

OBSERVATIONS

This year, several of the Lab’s processes, procedures, and policies were informed by the goal of teaching artists and student artists to use and care for the lab as a creative research space. We learned that our Artists-in-Residence and Student Artists-inResidence are capable of working in the lab with creative self-sufficiency after receiving training on the lab’s technology and opening/closing procedures. The majority of artists and student artists who worked in the space learned how to successfully operate the projection, lighting, and sound equipment following in-depth training sessions with the lab’s staff members. After witnessing several space bookings and events run smoothly and with minimal technological issues, we learned that the lab can function as a creative research space where artists can work with a necessary and developed skill set of creative autonomy.

Another significant takeaway from this year is that the lab’s space and resources are maximized when priority is given to student and artist projects that directly engage with the lab’s mission of functioning as a space for experimentation and exploration at the intersection of dance, performance, and technology. We found that when priority is given to students and artists in residence in collaboration with highly accomplished artists in the field, this increases the value of engagement in the lab 10-fold. The speed and efficacy of skill transfer are also enhanced in this regard.

Given the development of new instructional models in education, we learned that the lab offers a much-desired and high-value on-hand space for students to remove themselves from the stresses of screen engagement and on-campus scheduling. The lab provides a practical, generative, semi-secluded space to create work in active collaboration with other students interested in the field, as well as inspirational skill-sharing experiences with accomplished and inspiring artists, and also offers an environment in which to think and reflect calmly on their endeavors. Indeed, it is often the atmosphere of the space as a calm and supportive environment in which to think and create that is commented on and commended as a high-value experience.

We learned that by expanding the lab’s scope, vision, and efficacy within a rapidly changing field of emerging technology, beyond just that of providing a service, we have identified a growth opportunity and trajectory for building on the lab’s value at Barnard as well as locally and internationally.

Elsie K. Sloate Media Center

Spatial Audio workshop

OVERVIEW

The Sloate Media Center is a place for original media production, media content creation, media literacy, media experimentation, and media research. We inhabit an ethos of creativity, positivity, and collaboration. This is an inclusive and accessible space open to all members of the Barnard and Columbia communities, and everyone is welcome to learn how to create media regardless of their background, experience, or skill level.

The Media Center includes a bookable production studio and a drop-in postproduction lab, providing patrons access to a wide range of resources, such as an audio booth, an LED light grid operated from a switchboard, backdrops and greenscreens, as well as editing and animation software. We also collaborate with faculty around the integration of media into various curricula across disciplines at Barnard College, such as podcasting, video production and editing, photography, stop-motion animation, screenwriting, and other media production skills. We host events and programming, including open workshops; the Emerging Filmmaker Mentorship Program, where selected Barnard students receive funding and mentorship to create a short film; film screenings and panel discussions; and other initiatives that engage the community with media and media-making. Because the staffing and workflow intertwine with Instructional Media and Technology Services (IMATS), this report will also include information from IMATS, which operates a circulating equipment room and provides videography and photography services to the campus community.

Our team is comprised of the Director (Melanie Hibbert), Senior Associate Director (Rachel James), Media Specialist (Jess Saldaña, who departed June 2023), Senior IMATS Department Assistant (Eva-Quenby Johnson), and Media Center post-baccalaureate fellow (Claudia Gohn). We also have four part-time hourly Multimedia Video Producers, and 10-15 Barnard student workers who staff the IMATS media equipment room.

GENERAL SUMMARY OF THE YEAR

The Media Center continues to center mentorship as a strong theme in our programming. We view mentorship as important for everyone, but it’s particularly important in the arts, which can be more opaque as to how one builds a career or creates a film, as well as for women and nonbinary people, who historically have had fewer opportunities in the media and creative fields. We enact this objective through one of our signature programs, the Emerging Filmmaker Mentorship program, in which selected students receive funds (between $3,000-$4,000) to produce their own short films and also participate in extensive mentorship and instructional workshops. We also build in questions related to mentorship and career advice in our panel discussions with guest artists; for instance, at the Queen & Slim screening in Spring 2023 and talk-back with film stills photographer Lelanie Foster ’09, Senior Associate Director Rachel James facilitated a conversation about how Foster has been able to build a photography and media career. Mentorship is also reflected in our own internal talent pipelines, where we aim to grow from within and provide opportunities for staff to develop and advance.

Programming highlights from this year include events centered on themes of Indigenous films and Indigenous representation, which coincides with broader initiatives on campus, including the Picuris Pueblo Nation members’ visit to Barnard and Columbia University in fall 2022 and the creation of the Native American and Indigenous Studies concentration. Notably, we hosted a well-attended screening of the sci-fi action film Prey, with a talk-back featuring Prey producer and member of the Comanche and Blackfoot tribes Jhane Myers.

We also provide excellent media services, that truly inhabit the ethos of accessibility, as our production studio and equipment room are open to all Barnard and Columbia students, staff, and faculty, which is unique across the broader Columbia community. In the 2022-23 academic year, our studio had 139 audio booth and studio completed reservations; and our IMATS media equipment room provided 1,238 checkouts of 4,524 items to 525 unique patrons.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF 2022-2023

Events

A highlight from this past year were two events centered around themes of Indigenous films and Indigenous representation: screenings and panel discussions of Prey (March 2023) and The Fast Runner (October 2022). Prey — recently nominated for six Emmy Awards — is a sci-fi action film within the Predator franchise that takes place in a Comanche tribe in the 1700s, featuring a mostly Indigenous cast and spoken in Indigenous language. This event was organized by the Media Center, with cosponsorships from the American Studies Department and the Native American Student Council. We were fortunate to have Jhane Myers, producer of Prey and member of the Comanche and Blackfoot tribal nations, come to campus and visit two classes as well as host a Q&A at the well-attended screening.

The Fast Runner — considered a masterpiece of film by many scholars and winner of the 2002 Cannes Caméra d’Or — takes place in an Inuktitut tribe in Arctic Canada and features an Indigenous cast and crew. Our event featured a talk-back with Barnard faculty members Elizabeth Hutchinson and Timothy Vasko, as well as Indigenous community members from Arctic Alaska, including Mickey Stickman, traditional tribal chief of the Koyukon-Athabascan village of Nulato and member of the intergovernmental Arctic Council. While the conversations and films varied between the two — ranging from climate change issues facing Arctic Indigenous peoples to the casting of stunt dogs — broadly, these events highlighted the importance of Indigenous stories and representation on screen as well as Indigenous involvement behind the camera. This programming complemented other Native American-focused initiatives happening at Barnard, including the Picuris Pueblo Nation visit in Fall 2022, organized by faculty member Severin Fowles; relatedly, the academic technology team at IMATS piloted 3D scanning of Picuris artifacts, a project titled “Digital Repatriations,” which received support from Hewlett-Packard. This was concurrent with the creation of the Native American and Indigenous Studies concentration for the American Studies/ Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies (CCIS) major, launched in 2022-23, and an expansion of Indigenous studies in the Barnard curriculum.

Prey screening

Another event highlight was a screening of Queen & Slim, written by Lena Waithe, which was adjacent programming to her distinguished visit as the Barnard Commencement speaker in 2023. At the Queen & Slim screening, Lelanie Foster ’09 — a photographer who shot film stills for the movie and recently photographed the official portrait of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — participated in a conversation and talkback about her accomplished photography career and how she’s been able to navigate a career in the arts and find mentors. Mentorship is an ongoing theme at the Media Center and something we actively aim to cultivate through the Emerging Filmmaker Mentorship Program (EFMP) and highlight during public conversations with working artists, as well as via our own internal talent pipelines, to make arts careers more accessible.

Other screenings include hosting A League of One’s Own in Fall 2022 as part of the Feminist Film Screenings. We also co-sponsored the watch party of the PBS documentary Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space, organized by the Office of DEI. The latter event is part of the lead-up to the commemoration of 100 years of Black students at Barnard (in 2025). A project we began conversations with in Spring 2023 — leading to productions and shoots in Fall 2023 — is supporting and co-producing a Black at Barnard (working title) documentary, led by Nia Ashley ’16, which also aims to commemorate 100 years of Black students at Barnard, capturing multiple generations of Black alums and their stories, including universal experiences and generational specifics. The location shoots will occur all over the country, but some interviews will be recorded at the Sloate Media Center Production Studio.

Queen & Slim screening

Emerging Filmmaker Mentorship Program (EFMP)

One of the signature programs at the Sloate Media Center is the Emerging Filmmaker Mentorship Program, in which selected students receive funds (between $3,000$4,000) to produce their own short films. They also receive extensive mentorship and instructional workshops around such topics as casting, creating a film budget, script breakdowns and creating a shot list, and more. We have partnered with the Athena Center to have the EFMP student work showcased during the Athena Film Festival. We also hosted our own EFMP showcase in Fall 2022. This past year, we accepted three students — Amy Zhang, Selina Wu, and Ellie George — who have shot their films and are currently in the post-production phase. Notably, Syeda Anjum ’21 (former Media Center post-baccalaureate fellow, current part-time Multimedia Video Producer, and former EFMP mentee) screened her EFMP film May Be Unholy at the Astoria Film Festival.

EFMP interest meeting in the production studio

Fall 2022 EFMP showcase

Curricular Support and Workshops

Broadly, the Sloate Media Center supports media integration in various curricula across disciplines at Barnard College, particularly for courses fulfilling the Thinking Technologically and Digitally requirement. A consistent area of growth for the Media Center is around courses we support; since 2018, our support for courses has doubled and continues to grow with the Artemis Rising initiative through the Athena Center, where film industry practitioners or media experts teach 1-3-credit courses in topics such as screenwriting and film production. Our involvement, which can vary from single workshops to comprehensive semester-long support, includes projects such as podcasting, video production and editing, photography, stop-motion animation, screenwriting, and other media production skills. We believe that forms of media production can serve as methods of assessment and knowledge production, and it is especially interesting to consider how it can continue to grow at Barnard College in the midst of generative AI.

Film stills from the 2022-23 EFMP cohort production sets

In the 2023-24 academic year, the Sloate Media Center supported 17 courses with various media projects. Specific courses we have supported include Kimberly Springer’s course Oral History Methods & Praxis in America (workshops on audio equipment and recording, oral history practices, and media/file management; equipment support; one-on-one consultations), Abosede George’s African Communities in New York (workshops on audio equipment and recording, oral history practices, podcasting, and basic audio editing techniques; software and equipment support; one-on-one consultations), and Mark Santolucito’s Creative Embedded Systems (workshop on camera equipment, product photography, and pertinent Media Center resources; oneon-one consultations; help hours).

The Sloate Media Center also provides instructional workshops open to the entire Barnard and Columbia communities. In 2022-23, we hosted nine public workshops, covering topics such as Spatial Audio, Fiction Podcasting, and Crafting Media Résumés. Almost all of our workshops were collaborative, partnering with other centers or departments. Examples include working with the Movement Lab on the Spatial Audio workshop; Beyond Barnard on media résumés; or the Digital Humanities Center on the SpecTech workshop on AI Media Futures. A workshop highlight from this academic year was DSLR Food Photography; the Media Center brought in food from Massawa, an Ethiopian restaurant local to Harlem/Morningside Heights, and students learned DSLR photography and lighting. This workshop synergized a lot of aspects — students learned technical media skills; there was food and levity; and some of this work was actually used for Massawa’s social media channels, demonstrating community engagement with our neighborhood.

Food Photography DSLR workshop, with Ethiopian food from local restaurant Massawa

Media Services

The Sloate Media Center’s production studio and audio booth provide Columbia and Barnard students, faculty, and staff with a unique opportunity to create media projects with resources typically reserved for graduate programs. In the production studio, patrons have access to an array of cameras, camcorders, set dress materials, lighting and sound equipment, and a Whisper sound recording booth connected to a mixer and desktop computer. Hours were consistent with typical work hours (9 a.m.-5 p.m.) on weekdays, with the exception of Monday evening hours, which extended to 8 p.m. There were a total of 139 completed studio reservations made: 26 for the audio booth, and 113 studio reservations, for 56 patrons. We aim to provide an excellent resource to the community and are continuously trying new methods to better serve our patrons, such as providing weekend or evening hours. Starting in Fall 2023, we are implementing mandatory studio training for patrons; this training has been designed to ensure that all users have the necessary knowledge and skills to operate the studio equipment efficiently, maintain a safe working environment, and maximize the creative potential of the studio.

The IMATS Media Services equipment room, located on the second floor of Milstein, is a vibrant, student-worker hub providing a range of circulating equipment: projectors, speakers, cameras, podcasting equipment, and more. As with the studio, we are proud to provide such an accessible service to all Barnard and Columbia students, faculty, and staff. These are unique spaces and services, truly one-of-a-kind resources in the context of the other Columbia schools, where studio space and production equipment is typically available only for graduate students or other subsets. We do reserve advanced equipment for certain courses and also have noncirculating equipment for our own videography as well as for EFMP students. This past year, our equipment room managed 1,238 checkouts of 4,524 items to 525 unique patrons

In addition to the equipment room, the IMATS Media Team also manages Videography Services. This is a significant, full-suite, enterprise-service for the entire College, where we provide videography (and deliver edited files) for events, talks, performances, and video feeds for livestreaming. In the 2022-23 academic year, we fulfilled 128 requests — primarily recorded events, in which an edited file is delivered, but also photography for events and setting up video feeds for Zoom hybrid events. COVID has brought about many changes, and the “new normal” includes hybrid setups for events, conference, lectures, and so forth, which has created more demands on our team. We are currently reframing the scope of what videography services we can provide for our sustainability. We have also taken on a number of special videography projects. Last fall, our staff members filmed and edited video content that will accompany a neuroscience textbook, working with Jalisha Jenifer (post-doc) and Vassiki Chauhan. The focus is on MRI scans, and filming took place in both an MRI testing room and in the studio. We also filmed a training video, for psychiatry students, around exposure therapy for patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), in collaboration with Barnard faculty member Michael Wheaton.

OBSERVATIONS

The Media Center does a lot with a small staff, which we are proud of, but we have reached limitations around capacity; a goal for the 2023-24 year is to focus more on supporting the academic mission through teaching media production, media literacy, and other forms of media engagement and programming. So we are rescoping the parameters around the videography services that we offer so that we provide videography services only to departments on the academic side (that is, reporting up to the Provost). This means offloading approximately half of our workload around videography services. This proposal has support from the College, and this upcoming year will be a transitional one (so that it’s not an overnight change), with a July 1, 2024, date of being fully in effect. Overall, we embody an ethos of continuous improvements around operations; these are incremental changes, but they make our services and workflow stronger. For instance, we are implementing separate studio trainings for patron use of the production studio in Fall 2023.

A consistent area of growth is around curricular support; there has been a lot of interest around podcasting, and we have developed pedagogical resources and increased our equipment room inventory to reflect this. Podcasting in particular is interesting because it has been applied in so many disciplines across Barnard: history, Spanish language, art history, environment science, and more. We are also supporting the new Artemis Rising courses and welcome the expansion of film courses in the curriculum, particularly hands-on production classes, especially if we have the resources to provide increased high-quality support.

One point of reflection is that our most successful events “synergize” several different components; the alchemy involves collaboration with other departments, centers, faculty, or organizations; the event is engaging and fun; and it involves some type of high-caliber instruction (either theoretical or skills-based).

Finally, generative AI will be a big topic in the coming year. We are currently examining how AI tools can be used in the media creation sphere and thinking critically about the social and ethical impacts of its use as well as how the Sloate Media Center is positioned to engage with, and be a part of the conversation about, AI at Barnard and Columbia.

Media Services

Studio had 139 completed studio reservations made in FY23: 26 for the audio booth, and 113 reservations to 56 patrons.

Equipment room provided 1,238 checkouts of 4,524 items to 525 unique patrons. Videography services fulfilled 128 requests.

Alexandra Horowitz New York in Ten Objects (ENGLBC3223_001_2022_3)

Kimberly Springer

Oral History Methods & Praxis in America (AMSTBC3470_001_2022_3)

Danielle Douge Adaptation (FILMBC3250_001_2022_3)

Sekiya Dorsett

Eimi Imanishi

Chandler Miranda

Social Justice Documentary Filmmaking (Artemis Rising)

Film Production (FILMBC3200_001_2022_3)

Intro to Urban Ethnographies (URBSUN3308_001_2022_3)

Gabri Christa Screendance (DNCEBC3560_001_2022_3)

Abbesi Akhamie

Danielle Douge

Eimi Imanishi

Lisa Tiersten & Nara Milanich

Elizabeth Hutchinson

Film Grant Writing and Creative Career Strategy (Artemis Rising)

Advanced Screenwriting (FILMBC3120_001_2023_1)

Film Production (FILMBC3200_001_2023_1)

Senior Thesis/Histories of the Present, Barnard History Department: Senior Thesis

Two 2-hour workshops on audio equipment and recording, soundscaping, and advanced audio editing techniques. Software and equipment support. One-onone consultations and help hours.

Two 1.5-hour workshops on audio equipment and recording, oral history practices, and media/file management. Equipment support. One-on-one consultations.

Two 1.5-hour camera and video editing workshops, equipment and software support. Syllabus development support.

Two 1.5-hour camera and video editing workshops, equipment and software support. Syllabus development support.

Two 1.5-hour camera and video editing workshops. Equipment and software support.

One 1-hour workshop on audio equipment and recording, interview practices, and pertinent Media Center resources. Software and equipment support. One-onone consultations.

One 2-hour workshop on media/file management and advanced video editing techniques. Software and equipment support. One-on-one consultations.

Provided professional photoshoots for headshots and other course support.

One 2-hour camera workshop and 2-hour video editing workshop. Equipment support.

Camera workshop; facilitated studio space use. Equipment support.

Three 1- to 2-hour workshops on audio recording, podcast production, creative approaches to storytelling in the podcast medium, and audio editing. Software and equipment support.

American Monument Cultures (AHISBC2698_001_2023_1) Podcasting.

Abosede George

Kimberly Springer

Rachel Throop

African Communities in New York (HISTBC3770_001_2023_1)

Oral History Methods & Praxis in America | (AMSTBC3470_001_2023)

Two 1-hour workshops on audio equipment and recording, oral history practices, podcasting, and basic audio editing techniques. Software and equipment support. One-on-one consultations.

Two 1.5-hour workshops on audio equipment and recording, oral history practices, and media/file management. Equipment support. One-on-one consultations.

Complicating Class (EDUCBC3045_001_2023_1) Podcasting.

Irene Motyl

Mark Santolucito

Vienna Stories (GERMBC3022_001_2023_1)

Creative Embedded Systems (COMSBC3930_001_2023_1)

Two 1.5-hour workshops on camera equipment, interview practices, and basic video editing techniques. Software and equipment support. One-on-one consultations and help hours.

One 1-hour workshop on camera equipment, product photography, and pertinent Media Center resources. One-on-one consultations and help hours.

Vagelos Computational Science Center

OVERVIEW

The Vagelos Computational Science Center (CSC) facilitates the understanding, exploration, and use of computational science and technology across disciplines. We take an intentionally broad approach to computing and are dedicated to lowering the barrier of entry to its use for students across all disciplines and backgrounds. One of our main organizing principles is to engage students, faculty, and staff in learning about computing in meaningful ways, including thinking critically about the development and application of technology in society.

Our event programming reflects these values. We carry out our mission through open workshops held every two weeks, co-curricular support, roundtable discussions, publications, and ongoing collaborations with Barnard centers, departments, and outside institutions. A primary theme of our collaborations is to explore computational topics through an interdisciplinary lens with a focus on the building of technical skills and on social justice.

The CSC provides:

• resources and expertise for the greater Barnard community to build technical skills and increase digital literacy.

• resources for faculty and staff to advance scholarship and build computational methods into their curricula.

• open workshops at introductory and intermediate levels throughout the academic year for students, staff, faculty, and communities beyond Barnard to develop their practical skills in computational methods across a range of topics.

• a space for faculty, staff, and students from all disciplines to explore computing with a spirit of openness and collaboration.

GENERAL SUMMARY OF THE YEAR

The 2022-2023 academic year was an exciting year for the CSC. We are continuing to advance the use of computing across disciplines as well as engaging with important issues of computing and society and of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are experiencing strong and growing student interest in our programs, and we are continuing to create exciting collaborations across Milstein centers, Columbia, and outside institutions.

This year, we further refined and improved our Computing Fellows program, in which undergraduate student fellows are “attached” to Barnard courses, work with faculty, and participate in weekly meetings to enhance their pedagogical skills and engage in peer-to-peer mentorship. We continued to carry out research supported by the National Science Foundation on the effectiveness of the program, in partnership with Jennifer Rosales and the CEP. Our initial findings were published and presented at the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (ACM SIGCSE). We organized and co-sponsored events with other Milstein centers and other collaborators, including the ERC, IMATS, the Athena Center, the Department of Neuroscience, Columbia’s Data Science Institute, Beyond Barnard, and Cornell Tech. In an exciting new collaboration, we held a signature event, “Computing &,” on the relationship between technology and journalism, with the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at the Columbia University School of Journalism.

We held 14 open workshops this year, including two workshops developed and led by our undergraduate Computing Fellows and the CSC Postbaccalaureate Fellow, a workshop co-sponsored with the ERC, and — our most attended workshop — a student-led “pop-up” workshop that featured a panel of CS majors from Barnard and Columbia who spoke about their experiences and taught an introductory coding tutorial as part of CSEd Week.

We had a total of 470 in-person and online participants for our workshops and events, excluding our “Computing &” event with Columbia University. Our “Computing &” collaboration had close to 100 registered participants and inspired a pilot Computational Storytelling student fellowship that we are launching in Fall 2023.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF 2022-2023

In this section, we describe our accomplishments with respect to our major activities: our open workshop series, a signature event entitled “Computing &,” other events and collaborations, our Computing Fellows program, and additional activities and publications.

Open Workshops

Our twice-monthly Friday open workshops create an inclusive environment where participants can engage with each other, ask questions, and learn by doing. The workshops cover a variety of introductory and intermediate-level computing-related topics. All of our workshops in the 2022-2023 academic year were hybrid, held both in person and online, allowing people to participate in their preferred modality; we are continuing to see high engagement both in person and online.

In 2022-2023, our 14 open workshops had a total of 358 participants. Our CSEd Week workshop had 52 in-person and Zoom participants — the most participants of any of our 2022-2023 workshops, with folks coming from within the Barnard/Columbia community as well as high schools in New York City. Our second most attended workshop was led by CSC Technical Manager Marko Krkeljas on “Introduction to SQL and Relational Databases,” with 42 participants. We also had a high number of participants for our interdisciplinary workshops on Responsive Web Design, Data Visualization, and creating films and sounds from astronomical data. Below is a complete list of workshops for AY 2022-2023, with the number of online and in-person participants in parentheses:

• Computing Across Disciplines (14)

• Big Data from Small Cells (15)

• Data Analysis for Social Media: A Primer on the Twitter API (23)

• Experimenting with a Computational Model of a Neuron (25)

• Intro to Responsive Web Design (26)

• Visualizing Urban Data with Code (30)

• Using NLP to Compare Popular Authors (25)

• Pop-up Workshop: An Hour of Code (52)

• Data Analysis for Gamma-ray Astronomy (12)

• Intro to SQL and Relational Databases (42)

• CSC + ERC Workshop: Interactive Data Visualization Using Svelte and D3 (26)

• Neural Machine Translation Using Python (15)

• Exploring Urban Canopies in 3D (19)

• Visualizing the Universe (34)

Workshop exit surveys show overall satisfaction with the workshops. The surveys indicate that more than half of our workshop participants were affiliated with the Barnard/Columbia community (53% of total participants from Barnard and 11% from Columbia). The other 36% participants were from outside Barnard/Columbia, including high schools (2%) and other universities (13%). Of the undergraduates who responded to the survey, just under half (42%) were STEM majors; non-STEM majors included history, urban studies, and sociology, and 7% were undeclared. The average ratings to quantitative questions in the surveys, which include overall ratings for workshops, teaching to experience level, and understanding of material, showed improvements in teaching to experience level and a higher understanding of the material in 2022-2023 as compared with the previous academic year. The overall ratings of workshops between the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 academic years remained high and consistent.

Overall, the data and our anecdotal experience reflect that our workshop participants feel that the workshops are worth their time and taught appropriately relative to their experience level and that participants are generally satisfied with the topics covered and quality of instruction. We see many repeat participants who consistently join our open workshops throughout the year. Reflecting our goals of bringing computing to a broad community, our workshops attract people in STEM and other disciplines as well as a range of participants from Barnard/Columbia and beyond.

“Computing &”: A Conversation Series on Computation and Storytelling

Our signature event this year was a full-day talk series co-sponsored with the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University. The event, “Computing &,” was a series of panels exploring the complex and multifaceted role of computing in spaces of public life. Three panels each represented an area where computation directly impacts vulnerable communities and the stories told about them. The discussions highlighted the oppressive and surveillant aspects of technology as well as the innovative ways individuals and groups have leveraged technology and journalistic reporting to counteract these negative impacts.

The three panels were:

• Computing & Carceral Technology, a deep dive into the role of computation on communities pre-, during, and post-incarceration, exploring carceral technologies and alternative information networks, featuring Sylvia Ryerson (Yale University), Dan “April” Feng (Ameelio), Clarence Okoh (SSRC/Just Tech), Martin Garcia (Inside News), and moderator Adam Iscoe (Writer/Editor)

• Computing & Queering Technology, a discussion of the role of queer communities in the design and implementation of internet technologies, examining the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital world, featuring Afsaneh Rigot (Berkman Klein Center, Harvard), Christina Dragon (NIH), Colleen Macklin (Parsons), and a Tech Learning Collective instructor

• Computing & Reproductive Justice, an exploration of how technology intersects with reproductive rights and justice, featuring Anna Louie Sussman (journalist), Runa Sandvik (Granitt), Dr. Kameelah Philips (OB-GYN), and moderated by Saima Akhtar (Barnard CSC)

This event was in person only and had a total of 91 registrants.

Inspired by this event and new collaboration, we are piloting a student fellowship in Fall 2023 for undergraduates at Barnard and Columbia who are interested in producing a journalistic piece based on one or more topics covered at the event. The initiative is called the Computational Storytelling program, a semester-long partnership that explores the impact of technology and computation on society through hands-on workshops, talks, and data-oriented computational works of storytelling. The program is designed to meet the needs of undergraduates by providing computational training in a social context and providing access to storytelling and journalism training and opportunities. We have selected three fellows to report on stories related to queer technologies, carceral tech, and reproductive justice.

Other Events and Collaborations

In addition to our signature “Computing &” event, we also held two panels, an informational session, a student competition, and a co-sponsored talk with the ERC in Spring 2023. These events were primarily focused on topics relating to interdisciplinary computing and issues dealing with the impact of technology on society, which is a DEI focus that we are dedicated to developing at the Center. We had particularly strong participation in these events, indicating a high cross-campus interest in topics relating to interdisciplinary use of computing and responsible technology. We elaborate on the nature of these events below:

We held a well-attended “Computing in Neuroscience” panel featuring three neuroscience faculty and researchers discussing how computing, mathematical modeling, and data analysis are used and could be used in neuroscience to advance cutting-edge research. CSC Faculty Director Rebecca Wright led the panel discussion with Mary Harrington (Tippit Professor in the Life Sciences, Smith College), Gabrielle Gutierrez (Department of Neuroscience, Barnard College), and Martha Merrow (Institute for Medical Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München).

We also hosted an informational session with Cornell Tech on their BreakThrough Tech AI program — a free, 18-month extracurricular program hosted at Cornell Tech that helps college women (trans and cis), nonbinary students, and other folks from other groups underrepresented in technology fields gain the skills they need to get jobs in the fastest-growing areas: data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. The program kicked off in summer 2023 with 265 students enrolled, 21 of whom were Barnard students.

We continued our collaboration with IMATS to hold our annual Visualization Wall Competition and awarded three students $500 grants to create and present projects using the CyberTouch wall in 516 Milstein that combined their interests in science and technology. The finalists were Eris Gao ’24 (CS and architecture), Skylar Li ’23CU (biomedical engineering), and Elijah Zulu ’23CU (CS), with project topics addressing the sonification of art, simulations of pathogenic bacteria and human heartbeats, and generating flowers and plants that responded to real-world deforestation, respectively.

Other successful collaborations included a two-part workshop and talk series that responded to the demand of students to learn more about interactive data visualization, co-sponsored with the ERC.

Finally, we co-organized a career panel with Beyond Barnard titled “Technology Focus Panel: An Interdisciplinary Discussion About Ethics and/in Tech.” The panel was moderated by CSC Senior Associate Director Saima Akhtar, with three Barnard alumnae as panelists: Reena Jana (Head of Content & Partnership Enablement, Responsible Innovation at Google), Regina Flores Mir (founder, Data X), and Clare Garvie ’09 (human rights and political science; Training & Resource Counsel at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers). The rich conversation addressed how alumnae had found their way into technical or technically adjacent fields given their backgrounds and majors while they were students at Barnard.

Computing Fellows

Our Computing Fellows program promotes the inclusion of computing across the curriculum, ensuring that students are exposed to the value of computing in the context of specific disciplines and in an accessible way. In the 2022-2023 academic year, we had a total of 16 fellows across the Fall and Spring semesters attached to a total of 14 classes (in neuroscience, environmental science, physics, economics, education, French, and computer science itself), three chemistry labs, and ADDA, the Athena Digital Design Academy (a no-credit web design immersive).

The Computing Fellows program draws from promising practices already underway at Barnard, such as the Writing and Speaking Fellows programs, as well as evidencebased practices that stem from the value of peer and near-peer learning to promote engagement and self-efficacy. The program supports faculty to incorporate computational projects and activities into their courses by assisting with the development, planning, and implementation of computing-related activities. Fellows work with faculty and directly with the students in their attached courses to support student learning. For some courses, fellows develop and run in-class interactive computing workshops to teach students specific skills, carry out particular activities, or explore ideas. In courses with assigned computational projects, fellows provide ongoing support to students via one-on-one consultations as they carry out their projects, as well as office hours where students can drop in for support with computing-related concepts, assignments, or extracurricular projects.

The Computing Fellows program also provides leadership and skills development for the fellows themselves through weekly meetings, which include pedagogy training sessions to sharpen technical and social skills and emphasize inclusive and anti-racist pedagogy in teaching computational topics, allow fellows to refine and practice the workshops they will lead in their classes or as open CSC workshops, and provide a space to build community among the fellows.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, we are carrying out pedagogy research on the effectiveness of the Computing Fellows program. Our initial findings, which were published and presented at the SIGCSE 2023 annual conference, suggest that the program and similarly designed initiatives can positively contribute to both fellows’ and students’ engagement with computing. The Computing Fellows program was also featured in a Barnard Communications video in Spring 2023.

Other Student Supports and Activities

ADDA

(Athena Digital Design Academy) Web Immersive program

In partnership with the Athena Center, the CSC co-organized and co-sponsored a no-credit eight-week immersive web design and development program for Barnard students from any discipline who are interested in learning how to design and code their own personal website.

Grace

Lee Boggs Learning Lab

In Spring 2023, CSC Senior Associate Director Saima Akhtar and Prof. Erika Kitzmiller co-designed and taught EDUC 3041 Grace Lee Boggs Learning Lab, supported by a DEI Innovative Teaching Grant. The course was divided into a one-hour seminar discussion and one-hour digital skills-building lab focused on the life and legacy of Barnard alumna Grace Lee Boggs ’35. Akhtar and Kitzmiller also won a 2023-2024 DEI Council Grant to incorporate students’ digital research from the course into an Milstein exhibition, “The Life and Legacy of Grace Lee Boggs,” in Summer or Fall 2024.

Undergraduate Computer and Data Science Research Fair

We collaborated with Columbia’s Data Science Institute to host the inaugural ColumbiaBarnard Undergraduate Computer and Data Science Research Fair. The student-led fair highlights original research being conducted by undergraduate students across Columbia and Barnard in the areas of data science and society, interdisciplinary data science applications, and data science and computer science research, providing undergraduates with a unique opportunity to share their research experiences and outcomes and to receive feedback from faculty and industry experts.

CSC 516 Milstein Renovation

CSC Faculty Director Rebecca Wright, Senior Associate Director Saima Akhtar, and CSC Technical Manager Marko Krkeljas have worked with Capital Projects to create a more user-friendly computing environment in 516 Milstein. We have installed automated blinds that help reduce glare from the windows and have devised a furniture plan that improves the experience of learning and teaching in the lab. The improved desk and computer setup reduces the number of desktop computers from 24 to 12 so that users of the room can bring their own laptops and work in groups, as well as a reconfigured furniture layout in which users face the front of the room (instead of each other) and have better sightlines of both the podium and the Visualization Wall. We also have designed the room so that half of the furniture is movable for better collaboration and flexibility.

OBSERVATIONS

Participation in our event programming this year was strong, which we take to reflect an immense interest at Barnard/Columbia and, more broadly, in issues that lie at the intersection of technology and society — especially in problem-solving around tech-related biases, inequities, and approaching STEM topics as non-neutral — and that align well with our unique position as a science-oriented center in a historically women’s liberal arts college.

We have continued to run our workshops and several of our other events in hybrid mode, allowing for a broad range of participation. We have observed that the type of attendance (online vs. in person) varied throughout the course of the year, with greater Zoom attendance than in-person attendance at hybrid events during both semesters. Nonetheless, there is a richness to in-person participation that seems valuable. We will continue to offer workshops and some other events in a hybrid format in order to maintain accessibility and reach.

In AY 2023-2024, we have a robust plan for open workshop offerings, speaker series, and partnered and co-sponsored initiatives. We will have additional support from a newly hired staff, including PostBaccalaureate Fellow Kiley Matschke ’23 and a Center Coordinator, who will help with the day-to-day operations of the center and in strengthening our communications and event programming. We will also be assisted by Tara Anand, a Ph.D. student in biomedical informatics at Columbia University, who will be serving as our Graduate Assistant for the Computing Fellows program. We will fully take over the technical immersive portion of the ADDA (Athena Digital Design Academy) web development course from the Athena Center, which is now called Pixel@ CSC. Pixel will be facilitated and taught by recent Columbia University Teachers College alumna Anisa Bora. We will also launch the inaugural cohort of Computational Storytelling fellows in collaboration with the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University School of Journalism. Among our challenges is the shared space on the 5th floor, as it is shared between the CSC and the Program in Computer Science, which is itself rapidly expanding in response to dramatic student demand.