iNews 2021

iNews The Information School || Fall 2021

Research hits home Investigation into evictions data helps build support for stronger legal protections for tenants

LIBRARIAN, ARTIST, LEADER In her long and varied career, Tracie Hall has been guided by an unshakable commitment to information access for all

DISTINGUISHED ALUM Naomi Bishop is a staunch voice for equity in higher education, libraries and public health

ALL SMILES iMentorship program creates partnerships of lasting benefit to both students and mentors

INSIDE

DEAN’S MESSAGE

Uncovering a paper trail Work by iSchool faculty and students helps reveal evidence of violations of state sanctuary law 8

Pushing back on bias in AI Aylin Caliskan, a specialist in artificial intelligence ethics, joins the faculty 38 Program highlights . . . . . .3 Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 The Download . . . . . . . 16 In Memoriam . . . . 28, 43 Alumni Updates . . . . . . 34 Achievements . . . . . . . . 37 Faculty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Bookshelf . . . . . . . . . . . 42 PROGRAM CHAIRS Informatics: Amy J . Ko MLIS: Michelle H . Martin MSIM: Hala Annabi Ph.D.: Katie Davis

CREDITS Writing, editing and photography: Doug Parry, Maggie Foote, Jim Davis, Mary Lynn Lyke, Jessi Loerch, Michael Grass, Luna Reyna, Samantha Ahlhorn, Michelle H . Martin Design: Katie Mayer Cover illustration: Alexia Lozano Copyright 2021 University of Washington Information School

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Taking MSIM online is all about access B

efore most of us had heard the word “coronavirus,” the Information School was embracing the new, hybrid world of working and learning. As we have with our Library and Information Science program for more than 20 years, we were preparing to offer entirely online options for our Information Management master’s program when the pandemic struck.

Why? It comes down to one word: Access.

Access means meeting people where they are. When we began offering the MSIM online in the spring, it opened doors to people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend, whether the barrier is distance, work, child care or other life circumstances.

Access means fulfilling our mission as a public university and helping people in our state and region improve their professional prospects. A significant number of students enrolled in our online MSIM tracks so far are University of Washington alumni, many of them liberal-arts graduates looking to add a master’s degree that will make them highly sought-after in their chosen fields.

Access means providing opportunities for historically minoritized populations.

More than 100 students have enrolled in the online modes in our first few cohorts, and 28 percent of them are from underrepresented minority

groups. I’ve been thrilled to see us exceed our expectations so far, in terms of enrollment, diversity and the quality of students we’ve attracted to the program. Those students have given us enthusiastic feedback about the interactive community they’ve built, which is exciting to see.

Our mission to increase access isn’t limited to the MSIM program.

Our Informatics program, which has long turned away too many qualified students, is growing quickly to serve more of them. We are now accepting close to 300 new undergraduates annually, with plans to double that number in the next few years. We’ve also increased the size and diversity of our Ph.D. cohorts dramatically. And while our MLIS cohorts aren’t growing as rapidly, we have a strong focus on creating pathways for BIPOC students to join us, and our commitment to Native and Indigenous scholarship is stronger than ever.

Launching and running the MSIM program online is a huge undertaking, so we have worked behind the scenes with Noodle Partners, an education technology company, to help us operate it. But unlike many higher-education programs in the online space, we have kept all our instruction in-house. Our success is a testament to the hard work of faculty, who have worked with instructional designers to optimize their classes for teaching online. Teaching Professor Sean McGann conceived the program, and Program Chair Hala Annabi has gone above and beyond to see it to fruition. Communications Director Maggie Foote and MSIM Program Manager Rebecca Alhadeff have worked tirelessly with Noodle, and other Student Services and Academic Services staff have overperformed to ensure a great student experience.

We’ll soon be able to invite online students who are within range of campus to come here regularly for meetups and events, and I can’t wait. Access means the ability to be part of our welcoming, inclusive iSchool community, whether you’re a residential student or online.

If the past couple years have taught us anything, it’s how vital those personal connections truly are.

— Anind K. Dey, Dean and Professor

PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS | Informatics

AIMING SKY HIGH Shannon Gatta, a data engineer at Blue Origin, has big dreams for herself — and for helping others rise, too

Photo by Doug Parry

By Jessi Loerch Shannon Gatta’s work is out of this world.

Gatta, who graduated from the iSchool in 2020 with a degree in Informatics, works as a data engineer for the private aerospace company Blue Origin, has completed the first level of private astronaut training, and has interned at NASA. She’s not content with fulfilling her own dreams; she’s using her talents to help other people — particularly those from marginalized groups — shoot for the stars as well.

Gatta first found a passion for space while at Seattle Central College. She had moved to Seattle after serving with the Army National Guard in Afghanistan, with a goal of transferring to the University of Washington. At Seattle Central, she joined a rocketry club, which started her on a path she’d never expected.

“For me, it was a lot of large-scale topics I’d never really imagined,” she said. “It helped me align with what my goals were going to be.”

While studying at Seattle Central, Gatta found opportunities to get involved in aerospace research at the UW. She learned about Informatics and the iSchool, which sounded like the right fit for her. After she started at the iSchool, she took a data science class and liked it immediately.

“I loved that the class wasn’t just about the technology, it was about the responsibility that comes with knowing the data, and how you manipulate it and the power and accountability that comes along with the insight you provide,” she said.

Gatta was selected as a candidate for Out Astronaut in 2019 and completed the first phase of training. She’s still part of that

GATTA, continued on Page 33

Alumni spotlight: Jamie Prins, Informatics, 2005 NOW: SENIOR PRODUCT LEAD, AMAZON “I recently led the launch of Alexa’s first masculine-sounding voice and newest wake word, “Ziggy” (while parenting two kids at home during the pandemic) . To try the new voice, say, “Alexa, change your voice .”

As part of the Alexa Personality team, I advocate for strong design and UX research to ensure we are meeting the needs of our customers and being thoughtful about the role of personified AI in society . My Informatics background and the program’s focus on human-centered design has served me well at Amazon .”

ischool.uw.edu

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PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS | MLIS

QTPOC films in the spotlight

By Luna Reyna As a teenager, Michael Mungin would go to Co‘The Watermelon Woman’ and ‘Tongues Untied’ are among the works in a lumbia City Library in South Seattle to find books QTPOC film canon curated by Michael Mungin. and films about the intersecting complexities of being Black and gay, or what he called as a teenager, “same-gender loving.” Fortunately, some helpful librarians supported his pursuit by setting aside things that the American Library Association to create they thought he would find interesting. He realized “An Intersectional Lens: Towards a QTPOC Film Michael Mungin libraries can be a useful safe space and can point peoCanon.” The canon offers a curated list of films that ple toward resources that might make an impact in their lives. The showcase QTPOC in many intersecting and uniquely intimate experience stayed with him and has culminated in the work he is and eccentric ways of being and loving. doing now as a research and instruction librarian at UW Bothell.

“This is the kind of thing that I wish existed when I was a According to Mungin, ’10, finding films that center the expelittle younger, when I was a teenager just discovering libraries,” riences of queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) may have Mungin says. “It was always a struggle for me to find things that saved his life. “I think the lack of representation robs you of your spoke to what my future might be.” imagination for your own future,” he says. But when he was 13, The life-changing impact “All God’s Children” had for Mungin he discovered the 1996 documentary “All God’s Children.” The is what he hopes the film canon can have for other QTPOC short film explores the way Black Christian families with gay people who have never seen themselves in film and are looking and lesbian family members are able to reconcile their faith for real representation. He includes films like “The Waterwith their family member’s sexuality. The documentary is an exmelon Woman” by Black lesbian filmmaker Cheryl Dunye and ample of how people can learn to sit with their discomfort and “Tongues Untied” by director Marlon Riggs, a documentary accept the ones they love as they are. “I remember that really about the experiences of Black homosexual men. “It is just such resonating with me because it’s what I had hoped my experience an amazing, energetic documentary,” Mungin says. in coming out to my family would be like,” Mungin says.

Story courtesy of UW Magazine. Read more about Mungin’s In 2018, Mungin was awarded a Carnegie Whitney Grant from film canon at ischool.uw.edu/mungin.

Alumni spotlight: Traci Timmons, MLIS, 1999 NOW: SENIOR LIBRARIAN, SEATTLE ART MUSEUM “Art museum librarians support the work of their institutions at all levels and are being called on to find innovative ways to meet the educational, technological and social challenges museums face in the 21st century . I’m proud to shine a spotlight on this work in ‘The New Art Museum Library’ (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) . Through a series of scholarly essays, readers will develop an understanding about this dynamic field and the creative ways in which art museum librarians are making their institutions better .”

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PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS | MSIM

Strength in numbers Student group focused on cybersecurity is thriving — and more relevant than ever

By Jessi Loerch When Andy Herman joined the Information School’s Master of Science in Information Management program, he went looking for other students who shared his interest in cybersecurity.

When he found that there wasn’t a cybersecurity-focused student group, Herman joined with some friends to create one. He chose to affiliate with ISACA, a worldwide organization that supports people who work in information security, risk management and related fields.

Now, five years later, Herman has long since handed over the reins of ISACA, but he’s too attached to let it go completely. He now leads the governance, risk and compliance team within Mixed Reality at Microsoft, but continues to stay connected with the group’s new leaders and its academic advisor, Annie Searle, an iSchool associate teaching professor.

“When we started ISACA, it was not the intent to have it burn out after a year,” Herman said.

“We wanted to have a legacy.”

The group formed in spring 2016, and by the fall had 200 members. Herman and his fellow leaders organized events to allow students to connect with and learn from each other and professionals in the field. They invited guest speakers and held workshops to help students explore security and information management from a variety of perspectives.

From top: Andy Herman, Liz Crooks and Nicola Kalderash.

In the years since Herman started the group, it’s continued with new students leading the effort. Elizabeth (Liz) Crooks was the president of ISACA in 2018. She had come to the iSchool planning to study information security, and so was excited to find ISACA. She says ISACA was a valuable way to help students understand how broad the field of information security is — including jobs in compliance, risk management, auditing and software engineering. After graduation, she worked at Coalfire, a cybersecurity consulting company, and she now works for a law firm that focuses on privacy and data security.

“I think ISACA is really valuable because it gives students another doorway into the professional world,” she said. “It’s a way to get connected with professionals and potential careers and learn more about the overall profession. The iSchool does good conceptual and hands-on work, but it’s still incredibly valuable to hear what those folks do in their day-to-day and the types of things they’re thinking about.”

This year, Nicola Kalderash is carrying on the effort as ISACA’s new president. Kalderash, who is earning his MSIM, says that recent news events, such as the SolarWinds hack, are important reminders of the value of cybersecurity. He believes that everyone needs to understand cybersecurity, even if it’s not directly part of their job.

“We will all be in roles where we will be dealing with information that is private and confidential,” he said. “You need to know how to protect those assets.”

With that in mind, Kalderash is working this year to expand the group’s reach, including by teaming up with other student groups such as Women in Informatics and the Informatics Undergraduate Association. He also stresses the importance of looking at cybersecurity from many different angles.

“We need diversity of thought. We need a diverse workforce, both in education and background,” he said. “Hackers have various points of view, so we need that in the field as well.”

Alumni spotlight: Emily Smalligan, MSIM, 2018 NOW: BUSINESS MANAGER, MICROSOFT “I started a new role at Microsoft this past January, which has been a great next step (I was formerly a tech consultant at PwC) . I manage the business rhythms, financials and people initiatives for a 500+ person, global organization . I work closely with a wide variety of people from engineers to program managers to human resources staff — always seeking new ways to streamline our business processes, leverage Microsoft technologies, and exchange information quickly in this, still at the moment, entirely virtual world .”

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PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS | Ph.D.

New vistas in virtual reality Rachel Franz wins Apple Scholars fellowship that will support her work to improve the accessibility of VR

By Samantha Ahlhorn Rachel Franz, a Ph.D. student in the iSchool, recently received the Apple Scholars in AI/ML fellowship — awarded to researchers working in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning — for her work improving accessibility in virtual reality technology.

Franz has worked with accessibility in technology for many years, after majoring in cognitive science & architecture and human-computer interaction as an undergraduate. The field is somewhat unexplored, making her research unique.

“There’s not that many people working in that space yet,” Franz said.

Her past research focused on making technology easier to use for older individuals, who generally have changing abilities and a reluctance to use trial and error when learning new technologies.

Franz aimed to make technology more user-friendly by way of artificial intelligence, hopefully allowing older people to take advantage of new technologies.

However, once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she was unable to continue research with older participants. This led her to look for a new topic of study.

“I started realizing that there’s quite a few accessibility issues with VR,” Franz said. “[For] 30-some years, people have been working on different ways to move in VR, different ways to interact with objects in VR, and yet, the accessibility of these techniques hasn’t been explored yet.”

Thus, she began research in improving accessibility in VR for people with mobility limitations — research that would earn her the Apple Scholars fellowship.

Rachel Franz hopes to develop a system that can adapt to the abilities of people using VR technologies.

“My goal is to eventually design a recommender system that recommends interaction techniques based on people’s abilities, their preferences, [and] possibly the structure of the virtual environment,” Franz said.

This system would evaluate the user’s performance — how quickly and accurately they can use the technology — and adapt to it, increasing the amount of people who could use VR. This system will be applied to a wide variety of VR technologies and a wide variety of mobility limitations. “Across VR apps, they use different locomotion techniques, different object manipulation techniques, and so the use case would just be to kind of choose the best interaction techniques for that individual and for their physical abilities and that they would be able to use it across different apps,” Franz said.

The Apple Scholars fellowship, which was granted to 15 students globally this year, funds two years of research and provides a two-year mentorship with an Apple researcher with similar interests. Franz is working with Jeffrey P. Bigham, a researcher studying AI for accessibility.

This story is republished with permission of The Daily of University of Washington.

Alumni spotlight: Rachel Ivy Clarke, Doctorate, 2016 NOW: ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, SYRACUSE UNIV. SCHOOL OF INFORMATION STUDIES “I’ve been researching ways to increase access to diverse reading materials . My recent paper, co-authored with Sayward Schoonmaker (MSLIS ’19), ‘Metadata for Diversity: Identification and Implications of Political Access Points for Diverse Library Resources,’ won both the 2020 ALCTS Outstanding Publication Award and the 2020 Jesse H . Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research . We have since designed a prototype library catalog that retrieves and surfaces works from people with marginalized identities .”

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RESEARCH | Spotlight on iSchool scholarship

Fighting the tide Two years in, CIP is a leading voice against misinformation

By Michael Grass In September, iSchool Associate Professor Jevin West’s twoyear term as the Center for an Informed Public’s faculty director came to a close when the center’s directorship transitioned to co-founder Kate Starbird, a UW Human Centered Design & Engineering associate professor and iSchool adjunct associate professor.

In two years of research, public programming and educational outreach, the CIP saw significant achievements during West’s term as director. It secured major federal research funding, including the National Science Foundation’s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program awarding a $3 million collaborative grant to a CIP-led team, with support from Stanford University, to study multi-stakeholder models for rapid-response research of mis- and disinformation. That funding, along with a $1 million gift from Craig Newmark Philanthropies and other philanthropic support, has helped lay a strong foundation as the CIP heads into its third year.

“Jevin’s leadership has helped establish the CIP as an important research organization that’s helping to guide multidisciplinary efforts that will help us better understand the dynamics of misinformation and can empower all of us to become healthier — and savvier — participants in online information spaces,” Starbird said.

Since the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awarded $5 million to a UW team to establish the CIP in 2019, West, as founding director, has worked at an energetic pace with an iSchool-based team to jump-start the center’s early operations while pursuing important research collaborations and developing educational programming.

“Sometimes I feel like I am running after something that is moving faster and further away from me. Spending my days and nights chasing misinformation sometimes seems futile, but fortunately I work with a team at the CIP across the disciplinary landscape that is as committed as I am to slowing the spread of misinformation and its negative impacts on society,” West said.

As director, West appeared in scores of public-facing events, academic presentations, panel discussions and educational workshops, including speaking to dozens of local Rotary Clubs and community groups about how to spot misinformation; facilitating a popular AARP “factcheck ambassador” training program series in Washington state that was picked up by other AARP state chapters; and participating in book talks and workshops featuring Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World, the 2020 book he co-wrote with UW biology professor and CIP faculty member Carl Bergstrom.

In the CIP’s second year, CIP-affiliated researchers — including its co-founders, faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, Ph.D. students, graduate and undergraduate research assistants

— have published more than 20 articles in academic journals and have been featured in more than 200 news interviews, including prominent coverage of the CIP’s work by outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Seattle Times, National Public Radio, the Associated Press and NBC News.

As one of the center’s co-founders, West’s contributions will continue as a member of the CIP’s Executive Council and he’ll co-lead the CIP’s education and engagement work with iSchool senior principal research scientist and CIP co-founder Chris Coward.

Jevin West’s term as the Center for an Informed Public’s first faculty director ended in September.

“Spending my days and nights chasing misinformation sometimes seems futile, but fortunately I work with a team at the CIP across the disciplinary landscape that is as committed as I am to slowing the spread of misinformation and its negative impacts on society.” ischool.uw.edu

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RESEARCH | Spotlight on iSchool scholarship

WAITING TO BE FOUND iSchool faculty and students help cut through a mountain of data to reveal evidence of police violations of state sanctuary law

By Doug Parry The evidence was there, buried in tens of thousands of pages of documents: Local law enforcement agencies were failing to comply with Washington state law protecting immigrant rights.

To prove it, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) needed to find the signal in the noise.

That was right in the wheelhouse of Information School faculty and students. Several of them were part of a campus-wide research collaboration that produced a recent report showing that, contrary to the law’s stated purpose, local police and jails remain a pipeline to immigration enforcement and deportation.

The rights of undocumented immigrants are supposed to be shielded under 2019’s Keep Washington Working law, which prohibits law enforcement agencies from detaining people based on their immigration status or sharing information about them with federal authorities unless required by a court order.

In practice, the law has so far been applied inconsistently, the UWCHR report stated. While some local agencies have quickly adapted, others continue to alert federal agents when they encounter someone they suspect is undocumented. Information continues to flow passively, as well, through databases that are shared between local law enforcement and agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

After receiving anecdotal reports of deportations originating from routine interactions such as traffic stops, the UWCHR requested thousands of emails and arrest records under the Freedom of Information Act. Researchers dug into the records in 13 of the state’s 39 counties to see if they could detect patterns of practices that circumvent the law, UWCHR Director Angelina Godoy said. Even in limiting their research to those counties, they faced a massive undertaking.

“We immediately realized the research was important, but the question was, how do you do research on such a broad scope?” Godoy said. iSchool researchers, led by Associate Professor Ricardo Gomez, brought their ideas to the project about how to parse the data that the UWCHR was able to pull from the records.

Once they cleaned up and organized the text, they analyzed it for trends. They looked at who was seeking information from whom, who was sharing information with whom, and the mechanisms for information sharing between local officials and immigration officials.

“There’s a lot of noise, there’s a lot of repetition, there’s a lot of redundancy, and it’s not necessarily in any particular order,” Gomez said. “So you need an information management process to deal with the large volume of Ricardo Gomez information to make any meaning of it.”

What they found was sometimes surprisingly brazen disregard for the law, Gomez said. Some sheriffs in rural counties have even stated their unwillingness to comply.

“There is abundant evidence of continuing collaboration between local law enforcement and immigration enforcement,” he said. “It’s amazing that there is such a strong paper trail left behind in emails. I’m sure now that the report is published, agencies will say they are changing their policies, but it’s also possible they will continue to collaborate and hide their tracks better.” iSchool doctoral student Yubing Tian focused her work on Grant County, doing a deep dive into more than 8,000 pages of emails and several hundred arrest records. Tian said she was surprised by how often local officials would proactively refer people to immigration authorities, sharing personal information in a way that the law now forbids.

“We found multiple instances where a local official would say,

Updates Assistant Professor Alexis Hiniker and Associate Professor Jason Yip are among Alexis the collaborators in a Hiniker new network called Connecting the EdTech Research Ecosystem (CERES) . Based at the University of California, Irvine, CERES was 8

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launched in September with an $11 million grant from the Jacobs Foundation . Network researchers will study and design Jason Yip learning technologies with the goal of reducing the growing inequalities in children’s learning and development . Hiniker also received a Jacobs Foundation grant to investigate the influence of conversational agents

such as Siri and Alexa on children .

Associate Professor Ricardo Gomez has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar Fellowship for research intended to help protect the culture and rainforest of the Colombian Vaupés . The mountainous rainforest is home to the Cubeo Indigenous people . Gomez will use participatory photography to learn about Cubeo life and culture .

Alexia Lozano

‘Hey I came across this person. You should look into them. Here’s their date of birth and screen shots from the Department of Licensing database,’ ” Tian said.

Gomez’s and Tian’s work was part of a broad effort involving community partYubing Tian ners with the UWCHR’s Immigrant Rights Observatory and faculty and students from across the university, including the center’s project coordinator, Phil Neff; the School of Law; the Department of Sociology; UW Bothell; the Department of Law, Societies & Justice; and the Jackson School of International Studies. iSchool faculty members Bob Boiko, Marika Cifor and Megan Finn consulted on the project, and doctoral student Ana Bennett helped analyze email and arrest

The Center for an Informed Public and partners in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) released their report, “The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election .” A nonpartisan coalition of researchers, the EIP worked to understand and counteract mis- and disinformation during the 2020 U .S . election and its aftermath .

Assistant Professor Clarita Lefthand-

records. Numerous iSchool Master of Library and Information Science students participated in analyzing the data and looking for trends, earning credit in Gomez’s course on information and social justice.

“It’s a valuable learning opportunity for them to do social justice work with an information angle, to apply information science skills and library science skills to real-world problems that further and support social justice,” Gomez said.

Researchers will continue to monitor and defend the rights of the estimated 240,000 undocumented immigrants in Washington, Godoy said. “Hopefully a year or two after the law has passed, we’d start to see more institutionalization of compliance,” she said. “We’re excited to do more research and see if the trend lines of that first report continue.”

Begay and collaborators with the UW School of Social Work and Affiliated Tribes of Clarita Northwest Indians reLefthandceived a Robert Wood Begay Johnson Foundation award for A Holistic Environmental Health Approach to Promoting Health, Equity, and Water Security in One

Alaskan Native Village .

Bill Howe and the EquiTensors project team received the July 2021 “Innovation of the Month” award from the MetroLab Network . EquiTensors aims to learn fair, reusable, integrated representations of heterogeneous city data to improve performance of mobility prediction tasks while guarding against discriminatory effects .

Top: BTS at the 2019 Billboard Music Awards. (via Wikimedia Commons) Right: Associate Professor and BTS fan Jin Ha Lee with her dog, Bomi, and her BTS memorabilia. (Photo by Doug Parry)

Music services often out of sync with avid fans By studying the experiences of BTS fans, Jin Ha Lee explores how streaming services can better serve thriving fan communities

By Doug Parry With more than 20 million albums sold, a string of No. 1 hits and a dedicated fanbase known as “ARMY,” BTS is a worldwide phenomenon. To Jin Ha Lee, it’s also an important area for research.

Lee, an associate professor at the Information School and a proud BTS fan, wants to know how well music streaming services are serving the band’s fans and what they could do better to support fan communities. She also wants to contribute to documenting a moment in history she doesn’t expect to see repeated in her lifetime.

“That time will come when BTS is not here, when the living

memory is gone. How are people going to remember BTS and ARMY and find information and talk about it?” she asked.

“That’s really important for me, not only because I’m an ARMY and they’re Korean artists, but also because this is a once-ina-lifetime global cultural phenomenon. I’d love for this to be accurately documented and discussed and remembered.”

To that end, Lee has co-authored three papers on the BTS phenomenon over the past year. One looks at BTS as an example of how avid fans of particular artists use streaming services. Another takes an in-depth look at how ARMY followers on Twitter raised more than $1 million in one day to support Black Lives

Updates The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded more than $1 .6 million in funding for four projects supported by the iSchool: • A grant will support further work on misinformation escape rooms .

Senior Principal Research Scientist Chris Coward and Associate Professor 10

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Jin Ha Lee will help lead a project in 10 public libraries to create a design kit for libraries to develop escape rooms modeled after “the Euphorigen Investigation .” Developed by the iSchool’s Technology & Social Change Group, the escape room is designed as a fun, collaborative way to prompt people to use critical reasoning skills when they encounter misinformation .

• The iSchool will participate in Project Spectrum, an IMLS grant awarded to the American Library Association to build a cross-university cohort of 8-10 racially and ethnically diverse doctoral students focused on advancing racial equity and social justice in the LIS curriculum .

• Assistant Professor Nicholas Weber is a co-investigator on an IMLS-

Matter, and whether social media are designed to accommodate such efforts. And a forthcoming paper, using BTS as a case study, examines how streaming services can support bands’ efforts to promote mental health among fans.

In the first paper, on music fans’ use of streaming services such as Spotify, Lee and then-Informatics student Anh Nguyen found that the way music from multi-genre artists such as BTS is categorized often doesn’t serve fans well because the services’ recommendations are off-target. They also found that the streaming platforms lack support for fan participation and interactions between artists and fans, that fans would like more visual content to enrich their listening experience, and that users want more transparency in how artists’ popularity “The is measured and stronger agency in how they listen traditional to music. gatekeepers “Fans are now much more knowledgeable about the of music music ecosystem and savvy now have to about how they can maximize the support for their artists acknowledge through these services,” Lee the power said. The power structure is disrupted and changed. of fans.”

The traditional gatekeepers of music like radio DJs and more recently, streaming platform designers now have to acknowledge the power of fans.” The paper was accepted to last year’s International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) conference.

“You need to think about different kinds of needs that people have when they come into this space, and oftentimes that’s not reflected in the system design. Not everyone coming to the services are passive listeners who just want to listen to recommended playlists,” Lee said.

In studying the fundraising campaign, dubbed #MatchAMillion, Lee and co-authors from Stanford University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, sought to gain insights on how a decentralized fanbase used social media to work rapidly toward a goal of its own making.

New research group explores not the crisis, but the aftermath As people scramble to respond to an unfolding disaster, public-health emergency or other crisis, there tends to be a lot of confusion and seemingly little room for analysis. But when the dust settles, how do we document and what do we become?

AfterLab, a new research group at the iSchool, is dedicated to thinking about what happens after — the aftermath of disasters, afterlives of personal data, after careful attempts at ethical governance of technologies fail, and even what happens to our digital artifacts after we’re gone.

Anna Rather than cranking out prototypes and papers, Lauren the lab takes a longer view, looking at informaHoffmann tion science from critical and social science perspectives to learn how the uses of information urgently affect different people, especially people who have long been marginalized or oppressed.

“We want to make space for zooming out and Marika Cifor asking these big, thorny questions that have preservation, epistemological and political implications,” said Anna Lauren Hoffmann, one of three iSchool faculty members collaborating on the lab.

Hoffmann is starting the lab with fellow iSchool Assistant Professor Marika Cifor; iSchool Megan Finn Associate Professor Megan Finn; and Tonia Sutherland, an assistant professor at the University of Hawai’i. The team shares a common interest in the ways in which upheaval creates avenues to study social structures. For each of them, the aftermath of a crisis brings fresh perspective to Tonia issues such as ethical data practices, equity and Sutherland justice in archiving, and how the information infrastructure helps or harms people.

Hoffmann’s work focuses on how the ethical debates surrounding information technology allow people to articulate and contest

FANS, continued on Page 33

funded project to study the sharing, reuse and preservation of research objects produced by qualitative data analysis software .

• IMLS funding will support a partnership between the iSchool and the Tacoma Public Library to produce a model for implementing more diverse archives in collaboration with community groups that have been historically

underrepresented . Senior Research Scientist Jason Young is leading the UW’s involvement, and Assistant Professor Marika Cifor and Senior Research Scientist Chris Jowaisas are part of the team involved .

Karen Fisher’s longstanding iSchool-supported, UNHCR Jordan mission, “Za’atari Camp Libraries,”

AFTERLAB, continued on Page 37

won the 2021 International Joy of Reading award from Systematic, announced at Next Library in Aarhus, Karen Denmark . More than Fisher 40 libraries applied for the $10,000 award, and this was the first time it was won by war refugees and from a library in the Arab world . ischool.uw.edu

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The philosophy of

TRACIE HALL In her twin passions of art and librarianship, the executive director of ALA found all the tools to put the power of information in everyone’s hands

B Y D O U G PA R R Y

I

t was March 2020, early in the pandemic, and the rideshare driver was taking a risk with every fare. He picked up a woman whose face was covered in a mask.

“Where did you get that?” asked the driver, an older fellow who wasn’t exactly a digital native.

“I ordered it online,” she answered.

“Online? How would I get that?” he asked.

He was in luck. His passenger was Tracie D. Hall, MLIS ’00, executive director of the American Library Association (ALA), and she wasn’t going to get out of the car without helping him find the information he needed. She gave him a quick course in information-seeking, showing him how to use his phone for more than, as he described it, just navigating the streets of Chicago and calling his wife. She pointed him to a nearby church that was handing out PPE. “We’re talking about an issue of life and death, and the thing that can change the game for him in terms of possible COVID-19 exposure is digital information,” Hall says.

That’s Hall. Energetic, dynamic, passionate about putting the power of information into everyone’s hands.

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To Hall, broadband access is a human right and one of the things that motivate her as she leads the 55,000-member ALA. Digital equity is a matter of justice, she says, as are her other top priorities for the organization — diversifying the field of librarianship and advocating for resources to allow libraries to fulfill their central role in the life of their communities.

Hall took the helm of the 145-year-old organization in February 2020, barely getting time to settle into her chair before COVID-19 hit. Far from making her change course, the pandemic only reinforced her mission. At a time when many basic services went online, the lack of broadband access — especially among lower-income, rural and senior populations — came into sharp focus.

Parents looked to libraries to help educate and entertain their children. Adults who were suddenly jobless turned to libraries for help filing for unemployment and searching for new jobs. All of this at a time when a recession was hitting and libraries, already underfunded for years, were forced to move their staffs and services online.

“I knew that we needed to reclaim the

Photo by KinserStudios

“It’s hard not to feel more motivated to adhere to your own personal values when you’ve got someone leading you whose personal values are so much the bedrock of what she’s trying to do.”

national satellite space and public perception about what libraries do. That’s what I was fixated on,” Hall says. “Then comes the pandemic and whatever I have been thinking there, we have to do that times three!

“Everything now is about how we support online access to education, employment information, and even key services; who’s going to play that role? For people in communities where they don’t have digital access, who’s going to provide that? The answer often comes back to libraries. I think that rather than the pandemic taking me completely off my square, it actually has lent more urgency and more immediacy.”

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ibraries became Hall’s passion, but they weren’t her first career choice. After growing up in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles, she went to UC-Santa Barbara to earn bachelor’s degrees in law and society and African American studies. She went on to Yale University to earn her master’s in international studies, with hopes of working in Sub-Saharan Africa. While she was at Yale in 1992, though, a jury acquitted four police officers accused of using excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King. The acquittals set off a weeklong uprising in the south-central Los Angeles neighborhood where Hall grew up. The episode set her life on a different course.

“In my mind, I felt like I could make the most difference in communities where there were these huge resource and infrastructure gaps,” she says. “I had been looking at working in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet in my own community there was this need for care and commitment.”

After graduation, Hall returned to L.A. to direct a youth homeless shelter. As she introduced clients to resources and services, she discovered libraries in a new way. She became enamored with the power of libraries to give people a sense of agency. At the shelter, she had only a few tools to help people, but the library had a whole toolbox.

Hall saw a job listing at the Seattle Public Library (SPL), looking for someone who could blend reference services and social services, mostly focused on at-risk youth. She jumped at the chance to work at SPL and soon learned that many of her colleagues were UW graduates who encouraged her to pursue her master’s in library science there. Meanwhile, ALA was starting its Spectrum Scholarship program to increase diversity in the librarianship profession. In 1998, she applied and was accepted to both.

At the UW, where the Graduate School of Library and Information Science was transforming into the iSchool, Hall studied under faculty who would have a lasting influence

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on her. Spencer Shaw treated storytelling as an art and children as an audience that deserved high standards. Efthi Efthimiadis encouraged her to think about how technology could help people not only find information, but help them discover things that surprise them. Allyson Carlyle’s concepts on cataloging shaped her thinking on how to organize information, inside and outside of libraries.

“I can connect a lot of the thinking that I draw on today to those courses,” she says. “I really feel that I got a multipurpose master’s degree and exposure to ways of thinking about how ideas and resources can be organized that I have called on again and again.”

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long with the iSchool, SPL was a formative experience, Hall says. In the late ’90s, Seattle was taking off as a hub for technology, and she saw the workforce changing along with the city. Blue-collar workers were coming to the library because they needed to apply online for jobs for the first time. Students were coming in to submit homework assignments online. The experience convinced her that everyone needs digital literacy skills and connectivity — beliefs at the core of her work at ALA now.

“I cut those ideological teeth at Seattle Public Library,” she says. “We are all dependent to some degree on information access and on digital platforms. We have to begin to think about broadband as an essential resource for everyone.”

After earning her MLIS, Hall wanted to return to the East Coast, so she relocated to Connecticut, working at the New Haven and Hartford Free Public Libraries. In 2003, she moved to ALA to head its Office of Diversity and administer the Spectrum program. Since leaving that post in 2006, she’s made numerous stops in the academic, corporate, government and nonprofit worlds. From 2014-16, she served as deputy commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, overseeing visual and performing arts. Most recently, before rejoining ALA, she directed arts and culture grant-making for the Joyce Foundation, a Chicago-based philanthropic organization.

Hall faced a raft of challenges when she took over as executive director at ALA: an office relocation, the onset of the pandemic, and an unexpectedly daunting financial picture.

“She’s been very disciplined,” says Mary Mackay, ALA’s interim senior associate executive director. “No excuses — we just have to implement some things to make sure we position ourselves strongly for the future, with a big focus on membership and getting people engaged.”

Mackay says the current challenges haven’t restrained

Hall’s ambitions on initiatives such as universal broadband and diversification of the field. Since her arrival, Hall has worked to get the sprawling association working toward those same goals. Hall has her “eyes on the prize” and an inspirational leadership style.

“It’s hard not to feel more motivated to adhere to your own personal values when you’ve got someone leading you whose personal values are so much the bedrock of what she’s trying to do,” Mackay says.

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eronda Pitchford has seen Hall’s leadership from several perspectives, inside and outside of libraries and now as assistant director at Califa, a nonprofit consortium representing 230 California libraries. She describes Hall as “really fun” and “very intense.”

“She’s always thinking about the next step. Even if we’re talking socially, it’s like, ‘Oh, that reminds me how we should do this.’ I’m here to drink my latte and we’re having this deep conversation,” she says with a laugh.

Hall brings that same intensity whether she’s in a boardroom, at a breakfast table, or helping a young person get their foot in the door, Pitchford says.

“I have personally witnessed her in this current role give the same care and feeding to library school applicants as she would the biggest funder of ALA,” she says. “It is the same kind of energy, time, precision and professionalism.”

Joslyn Bowling Dixon was working in libraries when she met Hall at an ALA Annual Conference in Chicago in the early 2000s. At the time, she said, it was unusual to spot another Black attendee at a national conference, so when she saw the striking-looking woman with a shaved head, she decided she had to introduce herself. “She didn’t have to talk to me. She didn’t have to be nice. She was an officer, and I didn’t even have my MLIS yet,” Bowling Dixon says.

Yet Hall became a fast friend and mentor, introducing Bowling Dixon to her network and encouraging her to get her master’s in library and information science. Bowling Dixon was working and raising a child as a single, divorced parent at the time, but Hall convinced her the investment in herself was worth making. Now, as director of the Newark Public Library in New Jersey, Bowling Dixon still looks to Hall as an inspiration, particularly for women of color in the library world.

“When I started in librarianship in the late ’90s, I always felt othered,” Dixon says. “If there was something for people of color included in any kind of mainstream training, conversation, display or purchase, it was either accidental or non-existent. As a profession we’re not done, but we’ve made strides. Now I can see a person who looks like me at the top.

That means everything.

“It’s hard to describe how affirming it is to see somebody who looks like you in the decision-making seat and know that your concerns and interests will be there.”

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n describing Hall, Pitchford looks to a line from a Derek Walcott poem: “Feast on your life.”

“She really does that in her work and in her personal life.

In her work, it’s total drive and energy to get things done on behalf of the organization. That same joie de vivre, zest and fire is in her personal life as well,” she says.

One of a series of photographs by Tracie Hall called “A Familiar” (2020). In art and librarianship, Hall says, “I have found my greatest meaning and freedom.”

That’s evident in Hall’s other passions, which include creative writing and visual art. In recent years, she has gravitated toward the art world, and she stays connected as a member of Chicago’s Cultural Advisory Council. In 2016, she fulfilled a dream of founding her own art space, Rootwork Gallery, dedicated to showing art from folk and Indigenous traditions.

Along the way, she’s returned to her own art practice.

In art exhibitions, she frequently connects the works on display to text from writers she feels have been underread or forgotten. She tries to connect the dots for visitors so they can immediately understand the point she’s trying to convey.

The skills are right out of her librarianship toolbox.

“When I leave this place, I want my tombstone to read, ‘artist and librarian,’ ” she says. “I think those are the two main definers of the kind of work I’ve tried to do. In both of those places, that’s where I have found my greatest meaning and freedom.”

Friends say Hall’s other talents include interior decorating and cooking. Not surprisingly, she throws an excellent party.

You just have to be prepared; an intense conversation about how to improve community infrastructure or how to address generational poverty could break out at any moment.

While Hall has her other passions, the librarian wheels in her brain are always turning.

“Ever since I became a librarian, I have walked with a sense of purpose about my work. I absolutely cannot imagine working in a field or a space or profession where I don’t feel that,” she says. “I feel that every day.” ischool.uw.edu

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The download Exhibit tells stories of beauty, strength, resilience

Miranda Belarde-Lewis

Devastating colonial practices are the focus of an exhibition curated by Assistant Professor Miranda Belarde-Lewis that went on display this fall at the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art in Vancouver, B .C . “Sho Sho Esquire: Doctrine of Discovery” showcases Esquiro’s meticulously crafted couture gowns, textiles, paintings and photographs, which celebrate the beauty, strength and resilience of First Nations communities in the face of historical and ongoing trauma .

“This powerful and vital exhibition of contemporary fashion sheds an urgent light on the devastating impacts of the Doctrine of Discovery, an international law which influenced European settlers to believe they had dominion over the lands and Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere,” said Belarde-Lewis, the iSchool’s Joseph & Jill McKinstry Endowed Faculty Fellow in Native North American Indigenous Knowledge . The exhibition continues through June 5 . Meanwhile, “Raven and the Box of Daylight,” an exhibition of the work of Native glass artist Preston Singletary curated by BelardeLewis, will go on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D .C ., on Jan . 28, 2022 . If you’re making travel plans, you have until Jan . 29, 2023, to get there .

Mike at the mic

Five iSchool students among the Husky 100 Each year, the Husky 100 honors students who are making the most of their UW experience, in the classroom and in their communities .

Five iSchool students were among the 2021 honorees . They are (top row, left) Jack Lucas Chang, INFO ’21; (top row, right) Ali Salahuddin, a current MSIM student; (bottom row, from left) Jamie Ramos, MLIS ’21; Benjamin Xie, a current Ph .D . candidate; and Travis Windleharth, Ph .D . ’21 .

Michael Eisenberg, professor and dean emeritus, is never shy about sharing his opinions . A podcast he launched this year gives him a platform for sharing them . In “Libraries Lead,” he and co-host David Lankes of the University of South Carolina tackle topics such as social justice, misinformation and our emerging “new normal .”

Mike and Dave think that this can be a time of life-altering, groundbreaking, and transformative change with libraries and librarians fulfilling major roles to play as society comes to grip with the post-pandemic landscape .

It’s not all business, though — they also include segments such as “wazzup with Dave and Mike” and an “awesome library thingy” in each episode . You can find “Libraries Lead” at librarieslead .org and on Apple, Spotify or whatever podcasting app you prefer .

iSchool lands high on the charts The iSchool held the No . 2 spot in the latest rankings of U .S . master’s degree programs in library and information science by U .S . News & World Report . The iSchool rose steadily up the rankings in the past two decades, first reaching No . 2 in 2017 . It also ranked highly in several specialties, including digital librarianship (#2), information systems (#2), health librarianship (#3), and children and youth services (#5) .

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Distinguished connections Iisaaksiichaa Ross Braine, MSIM ’15, who was honored with the 2019 iSchool Distinguished Alumni Award, got a boost as he returned to start on his Ph .D . this fall . Braine was named the inaugural recipient of the Joseph and Jill McKinstry Endowed Ph .D . Fellowship in Native North American Indigenous Knowledge . The fellowship provides broad-based financial support while Braine completes his doctorate at the iSchool .

Braine previously worked as the UW tribal liaison and director of wǝłǝbʔaltxw (Intellectual House) . Jill McKinstry was the Distinguished Alumni Award recipient in 2020 .

Blame it on Siri?

Making headlines

Does hanging out with Alexa or Siri affect the way children communicate with their fellow humans? A recent study led by Assistant Professor Alexis Hiniker sought to find out if there’s any carryover . The team had a conversational agent (an animated robot or cactus character) teach 22 children between the ages of 5 and 10 to use the word “bungo” to ask it to speak more quickly . The children readily used the word when a robot slowed down its speech . While most children did use bungo in conversations with their parents, it became a source of play or an inside joke about acting like a robot . But when a researcher spoke slowly to the children, the kids rarely used bungo . Overall, the researchers found that children are sensitive to context when it comes to these conversations .

So if a child is acting sassy, it’s probably not Siri’s fault .

Associate Professor Chirag Shah is trying his hand at editing . The Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) has selected him as the founding editor-in-chief of a new publication, Information Matters . The digital publication, launched this fall at asist .org, will regularly communicate the latest trends and happenings in the information field to the public . ischool.uw.edu

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Story by Jim Davis

EVERYBODY WINS iMentorship program for INFO and MSIM students creates rewarding partnerships for all

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t some point, every aspiring entrepreneur either takes the risk and plunges ahead or sets aside the dream, possibly forever. Justin Banusing came to that crossroads last spring.

Banusing, then a junior at the Information School, had an idea for a startup to build esports programs for colleges and high schools in Southeast Asia, where competitive multiplayer video gaming is popular but formal esports programs are scarce.

While attending the UW last spring, Banusing also had a full-time job at a streaming content company. Should he stick with the job or pursue his business idea?

So, Banusing signed up for the iMentorship program, which has connected hundreds of iSchool students with professionals for career advice, insight on the job market and as a way to jumpstart their networking. Banusing was matched with Pioneer Square Labs’ Ansel Santosa.

With Santosa’s encouragement, Banusing launched AcadArena with two others this spring, raising enough capital in an initial round of funding to hire 20 full-time staffers. The company is creating esports programs in the Philippines and Singapore with plans to expand to Malaysia

iMentorship participants show mentors their thanks.

Shown are (clockwise from far page, top left): Lia Kitahata, INFO; Nina Slazinik, MSIM; Alycia Nguyen, INFO; Shareen Chang, INFO, and her dog, Bin Bin; Ken Yu-Ru Yang, MSIM, Eric Latham II, INFO; and Kenny Nguyen, MSIM.

and other countries.

“I don’t think I’d be here without the mentorship program, because honestly Ansel helped unlock the secret sauce when it comes to fundraising and creating a presentation and building together the team,” Banusing said. “We still talk a lot.”

The iMentorship program will start its fifth year this winter. The iSchool’s Laura Schildkraut created the noncredit extracurricular program to help students achieve their career goals while tapping into passionate support from iSchool alumni and others. It is mostly for upper division students in the Informatics and Master of Science in Information Management (MSIM) programs.

Schildkraut, an assistant teaching professor who runs the iSchool’s Informatics internship program, recruits the mentors and connects them with the students, but leaves the structure of the meetings to each pair. Usually, mentors and mentees get together every other week for several months during winter and spring quarters.

“We have students who want to be entrepreneurs,” Schildkraut said. “I don’t want to force them to write a resume. There are students who already have jobs and what they want to know is how to hit the ground running. … I leave it for the mentor and the mentee to figure out what they want to do.”

The program has grown in popularity since it was launched. In the pilot year, 2017-18, there were 38 mentor-mentee pairings. Last year, there were 171. Students get to connect with professionals in their field and gain a role model, but Schildkraut notes that mentors receive practical experience, too.

“Companies will encourage some of their younger ischool.uw.edu

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“This is like gold all around.

There’s no downside, which is what I just love about it.”

– Laura Schildkraut

employees to mentor because that’s getting them ready for supervisory positions and roles,” Schildkraut said. “This is like gold all around. There’s no downside, which is what I just love about it.”

Many of the mentors graduated from the iSchool, but Schildkraut notes that it’s not an alumni program. Schildkraut welcomes mentors with no ties to the school. One of those mentors is Jessica Turner, who works as a senior technical product manager for defense contractor Anduril Industries in Seattle.

Turner, who learned about the iMentorship program through a mutual acquaintance with Schildkraut, is one of four mentors who have volunteered every year since the program started. She critiques her mentees’ resumes, reviews their LinkedIn accounts and helps them practice interviewing. She also helps them understand what they might want to do after graduating.

Many of her mentees have been young women. She talks to them about her own experiences as a woman entering the tech world a decade ago and also has introduced them to a younger female colleague. Women need to understand that their experience in the workplace may be different from that of their male co-workers, Turner said. “It’s important being able to hear from other women who have gone through the same thing and understand what it’s like to reassure you that maybe it’s not as bad as you sometimes hear,” she said. “Or if it is, you have some other person who can talk to you and tell you why it’s still worth it.”

Nissim Panchpor has experienced both sides of the iMentorship program. He was a mentee in the first year of the program and served as a mentor for three years.

The Microsoft data engineer earned his master’s degree through the MSIM program in 2018. He came to the iSchool after working for IBM in India. In his final year of the MSIM program, Panchpor signed up for a mentorship and was matched with Aditya Kaul, who then was working with PwC, also known as PricewaterhouseCoopers.

“One of the main areas that he helped me with was my resume,” Panchpor said. “Even though I had a lot of content, it was probably a bit too much. I see that all the time now. People have so much content in a one-page resume.

It’s really difficult to read.”

Kaul also gave Panchpor an interview tip. Kaul suggested that Panchpor bring examples of his work product to the job interview. Panchpor printed data visualization charts and took them to his interview at Microsoft.

The hiring manager later told Panchpor that the handouts factored into the decision to hire him. The manager was working on a similar problem and reviewed the graphs after the interview.

Panchpor has been impressed with all three of his mentees and recommended them for jobs at Microsoft.

His first mentee was Yufei Li, who was in her second year in the MSIM program in spring 2019.

Li was on a job search when she signed up for the

From top to bottom, students Diego Torres, INFO; Rayna Tilley, INFO; and Thet Myat Noe, MSIM. 20

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Students Jared Garalde, MSIM (above left); Divya Suresh Kumar, MSIM (far right); and Justin Banusing, INFO.

iMentorship program. She wanted to be a business intelligence engineer and counted herself lucky when she was connected with Panchpor.

They met for coffee, sometimes weekly, during that spring as Panchpor reviewed her resume and made suggestions on her portfolio and website. He also gave her sample questions that he expected would be asked in an interview.

That May, Li landed a job with travel insurance business International Medical Group in Indianapolis, Indiana, where she still works. She told her parents first — they were in Seattle visiting from China. Then she texted Panchpor.

Li and Panchpor later celebrated over appetizers at a restaurant at Pike Place Market. They’ve kept in touch even after Li graduated.

“He not only helped me land my position,” Li said. “He also has helped me with rules in life as well.”

Santosa, who worked with Banusing on his startup, is another of the mentors who have volunteered every year of the program. Santosa graduated from the iSchool in 2013 and serves on the Informatics Advisory Board, where he first heard about the iMentorship program.

“I had such a great experience (at the iSchool) and love the school not only for what it does for students, but also for the Seattle employment community,” said Santosa, who is an engineer on the core team at Pioneer Square Labs.

Santosa walked Banusing through the tactical steps of creating a startup — hiring, managing an engineering team, interacting with venture capitalists. Santosa also reviewed Banusing’s pitch deck or business presentation.

“I helped reassure him what an incredible candidate he is for any job and that isn’t going to change if he takes a year or two to pursue his startup,” Santosa said.

Banusing is back at the UW this fall, planning to finish his Informatics degree in winter quarter while working on his business.

“My startup is all about building gaming in schools,” he said. “It’s not a good look if the founder’s a dropout.”

If you’re interested in participating in iMentorship, contact Laura Schildkraut at laurasc@uw.edu.

iSTAMP pairs professionals and MLIS students While iMentorship primarily serves students in the Informatics and Master of Science in Information Management programs, another iSchool mentorship initiative focuses on students earning their Master of Library and Information Science . The student-led iSTAMP (Student-to-Alumni Mentorship Program) pairs MLIS students with professionals in the field who have at least two years of work experience . iSTAMP is an opportunity to form meaningful connections between students and alumni to support personal and professional growth in the library and information science field, focusing on more than just specific career goals .

Alumni and students meet monthly online or in person .

Faculty sponsor Helene Williams arranges the iSTAMP pairings prior to each academic year . If you’re interested in participating in future years, contact iSTAMP coordinators Emily Beran and Laura Beene at istamp@uw .edu . ischool.uw.edu

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DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI AWARD 2021

Voice of knowledge Naomi Bishop is an outspoken advocate for equity, education and public health.

As a health sciences librarian, she brings her convictions to her work.

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s Naomi Bishop walks through Phoenix’s Heard Museum, she’s in awe of the intricate Native American artwork on display: tiny animal-shaped brooches; large, handspun Navajo fabrics; dolls depicting Native warriors on horseback, embellished with thousands of tiny beads.

Down the hallway is a large exhibit documenting the tragic history of American Indian boarding schools, where the federal government sent generations of children — by force or coercion — and immersed them in European-American culture in the 19th through mid-20th centuries. Native American culture was erased in the process, as the schools banned traditional languages, songs and dances, cut children’s hair, and forced them to wear American-style clothes. Trauma and abuse were common.

For Bishop, a member of the Akimel O’odham (Pima) tribe in Arizona’s Gila River Indian Community, that history is in her blood. Her own grandfather was sent to a boarding school and forced to learn English.

“For Native people, there was a time when we weren’t allowed to practice our language, we weren’t allowed to share our knowledge,” she says.

As a librarian, Bishop, MLIS ’10, feels empowered to share knowledge on a daily basis, and she’s never shy about doing so.

Her commitment to lifelong learning, her advocacy for public health, and her passion for equity in the library, university and health-care fields are among the reasons she is the 2021 iSchool Distinguished Alumni Award recipient.

As a health sciences librarian at the College of Medicine on the University of Arizona’s Phoenix campus, she helps students and faculty conduct research, teaches and leads workshops, and promotes community initiatives at the school. She tries to connect students with the large Native and Hispanic populations in Arizona — the people they will serve as physicians.

STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOUG PARRY

Naomi Bishop walks through an exhibit on the his

story of Indian boarding schools at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. ischool.uw.edu

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Bishop scans items on display in the University of Arizona’s Health Sciences Library.

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“My goal of being here as a librarian is, it’s not just books and models,” she says. “You need to learn about the community. It’s something you can experience, not just study.”

One of her initiatives at her library was a display about access to health care among Native people in Arizona. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, students knew about the challenges faced by tribal communities and responded by conducting a donation drive to bring personal protective equipment to them.

“I wasn’t behind all of that, but our students were engaged, I think, because they were exposed to that information and knew there was more to this community,” Bishop says.

On campus, she’s been outspoken about implicit bias in medical literature, prompting changes to the university’s curriculum. She recently co-wrote in a journal arguing that structural racism, discrimination and assimilation need to be accounted for as factors that contribute to health problems.

Bishop looks over southern Phoenix from a viewpoint at South Mountain Park.

South Mountain has a prominent role in oral traditions and songs of the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and other tribes in the region.

For example, she noted that doctors have been taught that Native Americans are susceptible to conditions such as diabetes, simply because they get the disease at higher rates than whites. But factors such as the removal of tribes’ traditional water sources go unaddressed as public health concerns.

“Instead of just saying, ‘Here are these problems,’ let’s address why,” Bishop says. “Let’s think about food and access to water and what’s being done to address that.”

She also had an influence on policy in Maricopa County, where she lives. In the early stages of the pandemic, a doctor from the county Board of Volunteers reached out to her, asking what research was available about the efficacy of cloth masks in preventing the virus from spreading. Bishop put her librarian skills to work, gathering information from countries where masks were more commonly worn. City and county leaders cited the information she provided in justifying their vote to enact a mask mandate in public spaces.

Bishop lives her values, and that comes across in her

My goal of being here as a librarian is, it’s not just books and models. You need to learn about the community.

It’s something you can experience, not just study.”

ischool.uw.edu

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Bishop looks at a display at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, which is dedicated to Native art.

work at the health sciences library, says her supervisor, Library Director David Bickford.

“She’s highly sensitive to the diversity of our student body and celebrates all of them through displays and through her collection development,” he says. “She’s done a great deal to expand our commitment to diverse authors, and not just diversity in terms of authors’ ancestry and characteristics, but also looking at things from different perspectives.”

Bishop’s leadership on social justice issues was among the reasons she was chosen from 1,865 nominees as the winner of the I Love My Librarian Award, given annually by the American Library Association with support from the Carnegie Corporation and the New York Public Library. In the past, she has also been a recipient of the American Indian Library Association’s (AILA) Rising Leader Award and a participant in the 2010 ALA Spectrum Leadership Institute. While at the iSchool, she had support from the Sylvia Lake Finley Multi-Ethnic Library Fellowship.

When Bishop began the Master of Library and Information Science program in 2008, she was the lone

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Native American master’s student at the iSchool. She took a leap of faith after visiting Seattle and meeting Cheryl Metoyer, then the associate dean for research; and Ph.D. students Miranda Belarde-Lewis and Marisa Duarte, who are now faculty members at the iSchool and Arizona State University, respectively.

Metoyer, who was among Bishop’s mentors at the iSchool, recalled that she brought the same determination and critical thinking on social justice issues to her classes at the UW. For one assignment, Bishop did a presentation on the cultural importance of how people, places and things are named and renamed, using her own tribe as an example.

Europeans’ approach was, “You erase the name of the place, you erase the name of the people, and you rename it so it fits within your lexicon,” Metoyer says. “She did a very powerful presentation, and it was real, because she was speaking about her own community.”

Bishop remains active in AILA, pressing for inclusion of Native authors and helping to choose the winners of its Youth Literature Awards. She and other advocates notched a recent success when the Association for Library

Bishop, pictured at South Mountain Park in south Phoenix, has called the desert home for most of her life.

Service to Children announced that AILA’s awards would be part of its slate of youth media prizes, along with the Newbery Medal, Caldecott Medal and other prestigious awards.

Inclusion in the awards will open up more opportunities for Native authors to tell their stories, Bishop says.

“That was the whole point of our awards — to get major publishers to see Native talent, to see Native artists and illustrations done in the most beautiful way to tell our stories,” she says. “Let these Native people publish and you will get incredible stories, real stories of life and love, and Caldecott winners and Newbery winners.”

The next step is to get those stories in the hands of young readers.

On her way out of the Heard Museum, Bishop stops by the children’s playroom and examines its book collection.

As she peruses the titles, she grows flustered. In a museum dedicated to American Indian art, she can’t find any books by Native authors.

“I’m going to have to talk to someone about that,” she says.

Bishop thumbs through her collection of children’s books by Native authors in her office. Along with her job in health sciences, she has worked with the American Indian Library Association to advocate for Native authors.

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IN MEMORIAM

Legacy of care Scott Barker left an enduring stamp on the iSchool and on information science

Remembering Scott Barker

By Doug Parry “He was my best friend.”

“He was super involved.”

“We would just chat about anything.”

When Scott Barker’s former students and TAs talk about the longtime IT director and teaching professor, they all seem to echo the same sentiments. He was always available to talk, always supporting them, always looking out for their best interests.

When Barker passed away unexpectedly on July 23 at age 59, he left a hole in the lives of family, colleagues, friends and students. He also left an enduring stamp on the Information School and the information science field, and a legacy of some 2,000 iSchool alumni whose lives he touched during his 22 years at the University of Washington.

Through his roles as an instructor, administrator and, from 2007-18, chair of the Informatics program, Barker had an extraordinary role in shaping the school. He was a key figure from the outset, having been lured west by Dean Emeritus Michael Eisenberg in 1999 to be part of the transformation from a single librarianship master’s program to an interdisciplinary information school. He ensured the school’s technology was second to none on campus, and he advocated for calling it “iSchool” for short — the first of dozens now doing so around the world.

When he became Informatics chair, the program became his passion. He threw himself into marketing the then-little-known major on campus, putting it on the map for freshman interest groups and UW admissions staff. Barker oversaw the program’s growth from 35-student cohorts each year to more than 200, 28

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Visit scottbarker.ischool.uw.edu to read more, leave your memories in our guestbook, or make a gift to the Scott Barker Endowed Fund for Excellence in Informatics .

A computer lab in Mary Gates Hall has been named the Scott F . Barker Co-Lab in his honor .

even as it turned away hundreds more outstanding applicants.

If Barker had his way, though, there would be no limit to the number of Informatics majors on campus.

“He fought for what he believed in, which was increasing enrollment and opening the opportunities up,” said Eisenberg, who became one of Barker’s closest friends. “Scott truly believed that information is the center of everything and it’s relevant to everybody, no matter what they do.”

That belief motivated him as he secured resources to grow the Informatics program and animated him when he taught INFO 200, the gateway course to the major. Reserved by nature, Barker became a showman in large lecture halls full of students, turning a dry subject such as IMAP protocols into an object of fascination and using a menacing voice to introduce students to the “DEEP … DARK … WEB.” “He was a champion,” iSchool Professor Batya Friedman said.

“He wanted every student to succeed. He wanted every student who wanted to do Informatics to be able to do Informatics. He

BARKER, continued on Page 33

GIVING

Inspiring ‘unlock moments’ Smartsheet CEO hopes new scholarship will change lives — and technology

By Doug Parry Mark Mader loves seeing people have “unlock moments” — when a light bulb goes on and they realize they’re capable of more than they thought possible.

The Smartsheet president and CEO hopes to inspire those moments with the establishment of a new scholarship at the University of Washington Information School. The Mark and Jaimee Mader Term Scholarship in Informatics will cover part of recipients’ tuition costs, beginning with three incoming freshmen this fall.

Much like when someone unlocks the solution to a problem using software, they can get a feeling of exhilaration when they find success in the classroom, with long-term benefits, Mader said.

“That feeling of, ‘I didn’t know I could get a scholarship, I thought I was completely boxed in,’ and all of a sudden that flips — that is a huge accelerant for people,” he said. “That’s not a temporary feeling; it can affect somebody for many years. That’s something we wanted to cultivate.”

Mader, a member of the iSchool Founding Board, said his own experience was one reason he wanted to fund the scholarships. He graduated from college without accumulating debt and wants to see more students have the same opportunity.

He was also motivated by a desire to broaden the talent pool for technology companies such as Smartsheet, which offers businesses a suite of software for collaboration and work management. The scholarship is intended to address systemic racism and grow diversity in tech by addressing the cost barrier, which is faced more frequently by people from historically minoritized groups.

“I think there’s been a growing awareness in the last year of an ‘advantage gap’ that exists, and I believe people have a duty to empower others,” Mader said. “There’s still much work to do, and many high-potential people who can be better positioned to thrive, who don’t have the means and may not know that there is capital interested in investing in them.”

Smartsheet employs about 10 iSchool alumni and is a frequent sponsor of Capstone projects, in which students tackle a project in collaboration with sponsors from the private or public sectors. In a field where talent is in demand, the Informatics program is ideal for investment because it produces graduates who are able to contribute from day one, Mader said.

“The performance of the iSchoolers we’ve had at the business so far motivated me to fund this with Jaimee,” he said.

A spirit of giving runs deep in Mader’s family. His mother, Eva, was a longtime crisis-line operator for LifeWire, helping

Mark and Jaimee Mader

people find shelter from abusive situations. Jaimee Mader’s mother, Dixie Jo Porter, was a leading fundraiser for the Seattle YWCA and her father, W. Thomas Porter, was a passionate supporter of UW Athletics who led fundraising efforts during the $54 million Campaign for the Student Athlete of the late 1990s. He passed away recently at age 87.

The three inaugural Mader Scholarship recipients — Nawal Dhabar, Jessica Mendoza and Nadia Sheikh — are all incoming freshmen who received direct admission to the Informatics program. Dhabar wrote that she is interested in a career in user interface design, Mendoza expressed her interest in information technology management, and Sheikh intends to concentrate on biomedical informatics.

In a letter expressing her gratitude for the scholarship, Dhabar wrote that it was a “blessing” that would allow her to pursue a career in tech without imposing financial stress on her family. “Thanks to this scholarship, I will be able to pursue my goals of working in the UI design field and breaking barriers as a Black Muslim woman in the field of tech,” she wrote.

Sheikh, who said the Biomedical & Health Informatics track was appealing because it combines health and technology, will be able to hit the ground running in Informatics without having to work during the school year. “This scholarship will help me with achieving my goal because it lets me focus more on school,” Sheikh said. “It takes a whole lot of weight off my shoulders.” ischool.uw.edu

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Amber Pepka, who now lives in Lynnwood, was evicted by two previous landlords with little notice. Changes to state law, supported by iSchool research, require tenants to be given more time to vacate.

FOUNDATION FOR CHANGE iSchool researchers scoured public records for meaningful data on evictions. Their work helped advocates make the case to enact new protections for tenants.

STORY BY JIM DAVIS MAIN PHOTO BY DOUG PARRY

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mber Pepka learned she was being evicted the first time five years ago when a friend visited her Bremerton apartment. Pepka was a student at Olympic College living with her boyfriend.

When the friend came over, she asked if they had seen the notice on their door. “We’re like, ‘No, what notice?’”

Pepka said. “She was like, ‘You guys are getting kicked out.’”

A new landlord had purchased the property and gave all of the tenants, including Pepka and her boyfriend, 20 days to leave. The landlord wanted to do a major renovation and charge higher rent, Pepka said.

They were able to find another apartment in Bremerton, but two years later, they faced eviction a second time.

The landlord was painting the exterior of the apartments and the painters knocked over planters on Pepka’s deck.

When she complained, the manager said that the painters had seen inside her apartment and said it was messy. The manager gave Pepka and her then husband 20 days to vacate. The couple were able to get a reprieve, but were still forced out a couple of months later.

Pepka and others in similar situations could be helped by changes to state law that provide new protections for tenants. Those protections were enacted in part due to

“The overall question was who’s getting evicted and how often.

This was not largely known, even though the data to answer that kind of question is publicly available.”

research from the University of Washington’s Information School, eScience Institute and Department of Sociology.

The Legislature this past spring passed a “just-cause” law that requires landlords to cite a reason for an eviction and, depending on the reason, extend the length of notice for evictions for tenants from what had been 20 days to longer in certain situations. For instance, landlords must give tenants 120 days’ notice for evictions for planned renovations. A second law called “right to counsel” that passed this year also provides legal assistance for some low-income tenants in eviction proceedings.

Washington Rep. Nicole Macri, D-Seattle, one of the sponsors of the new laws, has been interested in eviction reform since being elected in 2016, but needed a clear picture of what was occurring.

“We didn’t know the answers to who was impacted by evictions and who would benefit and how if we changed policy around residential evictions,” Macri said.

One of her former interns knew a Ph.D. candidate in the UW’s sociology department who had done his dissertation on one year of evictions in King County. That candidate, Tim Thomas, had been working with the ACLU and the Northwest Justice Project on a court case and was looking to see whether women were evicted at higher rates than men.

Reviewing more than 5,000 court records from 2013, Thomas found that there was no statistically significant gender difference in evictions for that lone year, but he found that people of color were being evicted at much higher rates than white people.

“The disparate impacts by race were pretty massive, particularly for King County, because only 9% of the population is African American, but Black women were being evicted seven times more than white women,” Thomas said.

Macri asked Thomas to expand this research to the rest of the state. Thomas was working on this problem when he met Bill Howe, an iSchool associate professor and founding director of the eScience Institute, at a conference. Howe and Thomas agreed to collaborate on what became the Washington Evictions Research Project.

“The overall question was who’s getting evicted and how often,” Howe said. “This was not largely known, even though the data to answer that kind of question is publicly available.”

Howe was able to funnel funding for the project through a grant from Microsoft. He also connected

Bill Howe, iSchool associate professor

Ott Toomet, iSchool assistant teaching professor

Thomas with iSchool Assistant Teaching Professor Ott Toomet and other graduate students.

Their research on several counties around the state found similar racial disparities in evictions. Black adults were named in eviction filings at much higher rates than average, with 1 in 6 given notices in Pierce County and 1 in 11 in King County from 2013 to 2017.

“These findings were very surprising and disturbing to policymakers,” Macri said. “I think that really helped shift the narrative and engagement about how landlord-tenant policy impacts residents in our state.”

Real stories emerge behind the numbers, including that of Celina Espinoza and her family. Like Pepka, Espinoza and her family have faced eviction twice in the past five years.

The first time occurred in 2017, when Espinoza was 17 and living with her mom and two siblings at a complex of eight townhomes in Burlington. Her family had been living there for eight years when a new owner purchased

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“From what I experienced, I just think that the laws that were in place were inhumane and unjust, especially for people who are struggling to find affordable housing.”

the property and sent the family an eviction notice.

“We weren’t given a reason as to why they didn’t want to keep us, but they kept some other tenants in the complex,” said Espinoza, who is now 22.

When they asked why they were being evicted, the new owners said they wanted to do a remodel, but the family later learned that the place underwent only minor renovations.

Espinoza’s mom is an accountant who was trying to start her own business and was also pregnant at the time.

“I saw the stress and the toll that it took on my mom,” Espinoza said.

Their family found a new home in Sedro-Woolley at an attached townhome. They faced eviction again in 2019 when the property’s owner sold the townhome. They’re now living at a house in Burlington.

Espinoza is attending Western Washington University, working toward a degree in physical education and health with minors in education and social justice. She’s glad that the Legislature has leveled the playing field for tenants.

“From what I experienced, I just think that the laws that were in place were inhumane and unjust, especially for people who are struggling to find affordable housing,” she said.

The iSchool research presented unique challenges that took an “advanced level of computational knowhow,” Howe said. The researchers had to go through thousands of court records that were in PDF formats. Some of the information that needed to be found and sorted was handwritten. The iSchool researchers created a machine-learning program to gather the data.

“We’re really being able to answer fundamentally different questions that you couldn’t answer otherwise, because it was not feasible or possible to do without these tools and techniques,” Howe said.

Thomas, who is now research director at the Urban Displacement Project at the University of California, Berkeley, said this research requires collaboration.

“Computer scientists need domain knowledge,” Thomas said. “So, they need to work with social scientists like us.

We need computer scientists, so we can advance research through technology.”

In 2019, the research led the Legislature to pass a set of reforms that required landlords to give tenants 14 days to respond to an eviction notice for failure to pay rent, rather than the three days previously required. It also requires

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Celina Espinoza, whose family was evicted twice.

more plain language in eviction notices.

Macri sees these reforms, and the ones passed earlier this year, as addressing the homelessness crisis. She works for the Downtown Emergency Services Center, a Seattle-based nonprofit that provides housing and health care for people who are homeless. She said there are valid reasons to evict tenants; she’s had to evict people in her job at the nonprofit.

She also understands how many people who are evicted end up homeless. A 2018 report from the Seattle Women’s Commission found that 88% of evictions lead to homelessness. Macri has witnessed people struggle for years after becoming homeless.

“When you listen to these stories again and again and again about the commonalities of how people lose their housing, I really felt like we had to address it at this moment in the process when people lose housing,” Macri said. “How can we prevent that?”

Pepka never became homeless. After being forced out the second time, she and her now ex-husband found a small house to rent in Port Orchard that was in disrepair, and had a tree-damaged roof.

Through this, Pepka obtained her associate’s degree from Olympic College and later a bachelor’s degree from Champlain College, based in Burlington, Vermont.

She’s moved to Lynnwood and works full-time as a tax conversion analyst for an accounting software company.

She’s also pursuing a master’s degree through Champlain.

She testified about her experiences with evictions before the Legislature earlier this year.

“I’m obviously in a much better situation than I was when I faced those evictions,” Pepka said. “Not everyone is as lucky as I am to be able to get out of that. So, l find it necessary to continue fighting for people who are still trapped.”

BARKER, from Page 28 wanted everyone to feel like they had a place there, no matter what background they were coming from or however they arrived at it.”

Friedman arrived at the iSchool not long after Barker and was charged with developing the Informatics major. She worked sideby-side with Barker, who brought his technical expertise to the table as they built the curriculum of core courses and electives. He was hooked on the program, its quirky, fun atmosphere and the tight-knit community that he helped foster. When he took over as chair a few years later, he became its leading evangelist. “I think he really believed that the things that we were offering were the kinds of things that every citizen should be aware of,” Friedman said.

When his term as program chair ended in 2018, Barker continued to teach and help launch the Informatics minor with Professor Amy Ko, the current chair. Though his administrative role had changed, his passion for the major and the students was as strong as ever. He still learned every student’s name; he reached out to many of them unprompted, just to check in; and he responded to instant messages from teaching assistants in the wee hours of the morning.

“He felt like a friend, not really like a boss,” said Shane Martin, ’20, a TA for Barker from 2018-20. “He would ask me questions about of the blue, like, ‘How is your internship going?’ ” Martin said. He would reach out and check in on me, just at random times. Sometimes at 11:30, sometimes at 2 a.m.”

One year, after realizing that several of his students and TAs had nowhere to go for the Thanksgiving holiday while attending school far from home, Barker extended an invitation to his home for a traditional meal. It soon became an annual tradition — “Thanksgiving at Scott’s,” an open invitation to all Informatics students.

Barker’s connection with students was like something out of fiction, said Ansel Santosa, ’13, a senior software engineer at Pioneer Square Labs. He applied to the Informatics program after taking an INFO 200 class taught by Barker and Eisenberg.

“I feel like he was the Hagrid of the iSchool,” Santosa said, likening Barker to students’ loyal ally in the Harry Potter series. “You feel like he’d been there forever, was super supportive, had a lot of pull with everybody, and really cared about the students.”

That made a big difference to Brenda Obonyo, a senior Informatics major who took INFO 200 with Barker. When Obonyo was unhappy with a grade in a course with another instructor, she turned to Barker, who liked to call her “best friend.” He advised her to advocate for herself when she believes she’s in the right, but he also told her that a poor grade wouldn’t define her.

“He told me, ‘You know, Brenda, no one will ever ask you what grade you got after this. Just remember you are not your grade.’

That statement plays a role in my life right now,” she said.

Barker’s mentorship made such an impression that Santosa, Martin and Obonyo all spoke of their desire to emulate him — his caring, pragmatic approach; his responsiveness; his genuine interest in the lives and well-being of others. They represent just a few of the thousands of people who will carry his example of leadership forward, Friedman said. “If those students all go out in the world and make a positive difference, that is all a tribute ultimately to Scott,” she said. “Then they will help people, and the people they impact. … There is a long tail here. Ripples that Scott has put out into the world.”

GATTA, from Page 3 program, which is seeking funding to send an openly queer astronaut into space. As a queer woman, it’s a goal she cares about deeply.

“That kind of visibility is important, not only for our own community but also for our capability to inspire the next generation,” she said.

Gatta was hired by Blue Origin right out of school. She is an aerospace data engineer on New Glenn, the largest payload capacity rocket ever created. Her work is creating a software platform that connects, tracks and interprets the immense amount of information that’s collected from the rocket’s many sensors.

Now, Gatta is thinking beyond her work and focusing on helping other people in the field. At Blue Origin, she is the president of an LGBTQ+ organization of more than 150 employees.

“I think a lot of my goals now for the future are not so much career-oriented, but about my volunteer work, and my job affords me that time,” she said. “When you’re in college, it’s always about what you create and what you do.

Now that I’ve graduated, my life has centered around — what are you cultivating? What are you revisiting? Who are you helping?”

FANS, from Page 11 They argue that such campaigns have design implications for social media platforms such as Twitter, where #MatchAMillion took off.

In conducting her research, Lee faces misperceptions that BTS is a boy band that needn’t be taken seriously, or that its fans are mindlessly following what’s been fed to them. “I soon learned that the ARMY fandom is probably one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented communities in the media, often by people who aren’t part of the community. I want to document what the fandom is really like, from an insider’s point of view,” she said. The disregard for BTS and pop music is similar to what she encounters in one of her primary research interests — documenting the history of video game development.

“I do research with popular media, and it’s a common thread that something that brings joy to people is often undervalued and undermined,” she said. “At the end of the day, physical health will enable you to continue living, but mentally what keeps people wanting to live are these things that bring people joy.

“What’s considered as fun things are often not documented well, they are not preserved well, and a lot of it is already lost. If I can do research to help document that a little better and push the needle a little more, I’ll say that’s a really fulfilling career.” ischool.uw.edu

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Alumni updates Where are you now? Let us know at ischool.uw.edu/alumni/updates.

Informatics Lauren Appelbaum, ’13, is a technical editor at Amazon Web Services after a few years as a technical writer .

Dylan Babbs, ’17, is working as a product designer at Uber .

Hamed Barahimi, ’11, is the IT director for Inpatient Systems & Services at Stanford Health Care in Palo Alto, California . He got his master’s from the UW in Health Informatics and Health Information Management in 2017 .

Drew Before, ’17, is working as a lead front-end developer at Nintendo . He’s working on rebuilding Nintendo .com from the ground up to support an integrated e-commerce store .

Andrey Butenko, ’21, is working as a software developer at Amazon Web Services . He also volunteers as a Python instructor with the Microsoft TEALS Program .

Eric Cohen, ’21, is an operations associate at Fraym, a geospatial data science company headquartered in Arlington, Virginia .

Michael Cohen, ’12, is a software development manager at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure .

Nina Dang, ’15, is working at Asana in San Francisco .

Greyson Fields, ’21, is working as a product manager at VMware on the Cloud Commerce team .

Peter Freschi, ’17, celebrated his 4-year anniversary working at Qualtrics . He was recently promoted to senior software test engineer .

Godgiven Grogan, ’20, reported starting on her MBA at Washington State 34

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University . “What else am I supposed to do during this pandemic?” she says .

company in the community and creator economy space .

Muhammad Hussain, ’19, is working at Salesforce as a technical architect .

Atinder Saini, ’16, is at OpenTable, where he has been building products since 2019 . He gained hands-on experience as a product manager and product/UX designer over the past five years .

Liz Johnke, ’10, was working as a principal product designer at Boeing, leading the UX team for the Manufacturing Operations Management Tool Suite, supporting 90,000 global factory workers . Liz is a Boeing associate technical fellow and the first woman to earn the designation for UX design and design thinking at Boeing .

Shaarika Kaul, ’19, is working as a marketing data analyst at Visa . She is also working on the second book in the “Mindful Mansi” series with her co-author .

She still plays cello, sings, and models for South Asian designers .

Locksley Kolakowski, ’21, joined Accenture as a software architect analyst .

She started the online MSIM program this fall with her two siblings, who are also Informatics alumni . Her twin sister is working at Avanade and her brother at Amazon .

Jacob Leighty, ’16, is working as a hybrid UX designer/software engineer at T-Mobile .

Kevin Ly, ’16, is a program manager for Facebook and Instagram Shops .

Lilian Mburu, ’20, is working in downtown Boston at Mass General Hospital, in its oncology department as a system design engineer . She reports that she misses Seattle most days, but Boston is growing on her .

Matthew Mun, ’21, is working for Amazon as a software development engineer .

Katherine Root, ’12, is working as the director of design at Mighty Networks, a

Mikala Salley, ’12, is working as a quality assurance engineer at Amazon .

Mikala is a Seattle Sounders supporter and outdoor enthusiast .

Kecheng Sun, ’20, started as a UX designer at PwC’s Experience Center .

He was relocating to Chicago to start his new journey following the completion of a master’s degree .

Ashmann Syngle, ’21, is working as a software engineer at HBO Max .

Erik Thomas-Hommer, ’21, is working as a software developer at Amazon while trying to start a hospitality SaaS company on the side .

Caleb Thorsteinson, ’16, is working as a software engineer, building real-time translation systems at Amazon .

Andrew Vitollo, ’11, is a senior product manager at Trusona, working on a usable and secure solution to solve the problems associated with using passwords on the internet .

Nicholas Xu, ’21, is working as a program manager at Microsoft .

Jessie Zhang, ’17, is a student in the MS in Human Centered Design & Engineering program at the University of Washington .

MLIS Kristina J. Alayan, MLIS Law ’10, was appointed associate dean for library & technology and associate law school

professor at the University of Maryland’s Francis King Carey School of Law .

Margaret Ansell, ’12, was awarded promotion and tenure at the University of Florida . Margaret is currently serving as the associate chair of the Gainesville Health Science Center Library at the rank of associate university librarian .

Audrey Barbakoff, ’10, completed her Doctorate of Education in organizational change and leadership from the University of Southern California .

Jennifer Brady, ’17, followed her MLIS with her Doctorate of Education at Lindenwood University in higher education administration and instructional design . She’s now the library director for the Southwest Baptist University Springfield campus and the personal librarian to the College of Health professions .

Kawanna Bright, ’12, earned her Ph .D . in 2018 at the University of Denver in research methods and statistics and is now an assistant professor at East Carolina University . This year, she and colleagues were awarded an IMLS grant for a project titled Identifying Opportunities for Retention of BIPOC Librarians Using Survival Analysis .

Debbie Chavez, ’99, started a nonprofit, Libraries for the World, to create libraries in areas of the world that don’t have easy access to books .

Warren Chin, ’12, is a children’s services librarian at Seattle Public Library’s Columbia Branch, the same library where he volunteered in high school .

Kat Cuff, ’13, is the director of provider relations at Ex Libris, a ProQuest company . Kat oversees a team of librarians based in the U .S . and Israel .

Marjorie Doyle, ’83, continues to volunteer at Missoula Public Library in its Memory Cafe program that she helped start five years ago . She also trains volunteers in various areas and frequently recommends new programs for consideration . Marjorie retired as a reference librarian from the library in 2015 .

Leslie Denning, ’19, is a taxonomist/

ontologist at Amazon, working directly with the website taxonomy on a global scale .

nonpartisan campaign for Clackamas County Clerk and will be on the ballot in 2022 .

Bethany Ellerbrook, ’19, accepted a permanent position with the Walt Disney Animation Research Library .

Katharine Macy, ’14, earned a promotion to associate librarian with tenure at Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis, where she is the collection assessment librarian and subject liaison to business and economics .

Kelly Grader, ’20, is working as a medical librarian for a research institution/teaching hospital in Los Angeles .

Nicole Gustavsen, ’16, has been the STEM liaison librarian at Gonzaga University in Spokane since 2019 .

Jessica Jones (Gimse), ’15, has started in a new position as the reference archivist at the Puget Sound Regional Branch of the Washington State Archives .

Grove Kroger, ’74, had an essay, “Lawrence Durrell’s Paradise Lost,” published in the 2021 issue of Limberlost Review: A Literary Journal of the Mountain West, and his article “Uncertain Landfalls: In Search of Odysseus” appeared in the June 2021 issue of the Amsterdam Quarterly . His poem “Out Here the Distances” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2020

by Synaeresis magazine .

Seth Kurke, ’21, is an archivist/ Indigenous studies outreach coordinator for Documentary Educational Resources, based in Watertown, Massachusetts .

He was hired to revamp their catalog to make it more accessible and to do outreach to Indigenous communities documented in the films .

Tonya Livshits, MLIS Law ’14, is working as a research manager at Holland & Knight LLP in its Los Angeles office .

Julie McBrien, ’19, reports: “My career goal was to be an academic librarian and this year I finally did it!” She began a new job as head of access services at Lasell University’s Brennan Library .

Catherine McMullen, ’08, made the switch from books to ballots in 2015 and is a voter-focused elections administrator in Oregon . She was recognized in August 2021 by the Oregon Association of County Clerks as a certified elections administrator . She has launched a

Nichole Maiman Waterman, ’12, launched a consulting firm — Waterman Works — in 2020, specializing in fundraising and development operations for small and medium-sized nonprofits .

This year, she began working with the IF Project as its first development director .

Joe Marquez, ’06, is working as a UX researcher at Zipline .

Ingrid Mattson, MLIS Law ’12, was appointed associate dean for library services, professor of legal research, and director of the law library at Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University .

Kevin Mittge, ’94, is the adult services librarian and Mapleton branch manager at the Siuslaw Public Library District in Florence, Oregon .

Thomas Moak, ’79, has retired from Mid-Columbia Libraries in Kennewick, Washington, after 41 years as a librarian and manager . He continues to work as an elected commissioner of the Port of Kennewick and as an appointed commissioner of the Kennewick Housing Authority .

Matthew Myers, ’18, recently was promoted to Librarian II and took on duties as the data librarian for the Virginia Beach Public Library system .

Bridget Nowlin, ’14, became director of library services at Cornish College of the Arts .

Mahina Oshie, ’06, is working as a genealogy librarian in special collections at Seattle Public Library .

Robert “Bob” Pankl, ’70, has been volunteering at Mount Rainier National Park as part of the Cascades Butterfly Project . He retired from the Tacoma Public Library in 2017 after 44 years . ischool.uw.edu

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Carrie Phillips, ’06, was appointed library director for Musselman Library at Bluffton University in Ohio, following 15 years as an archives and special collections librarian for the same organization .

Anna Price, ’20, is working at the Law Library of Congress, where she was recently promoted to senior legal reference librarian . She has been at the library since May 2019 after being hired about halfway through the MLIS program .

Carli Reinecke, ’20, started as an associate academic librarian for the University of Wisconsin Green Bay at its Marinette campus .

Alicia Salaz, ’06, was appointed vice provost and university librarian at the University of Oregon .

Murray Sampson, ’11, works for the American Booksellers Association, doing customer support for its Drupal-based e-commerce platform, IndieCommerce .

Sohrab Seera, ’20, is the CEO and founder of Computing ReApplied, a company he began in 2019 .

Anna Sgarlato, ’14, is working at ProQuest, where she’s been since 2018 .

Erin Sharwell, ’07, was appointed head of circulation services at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia .

Ellen Shatter, ’69, reports that she is enjoying retirement: “I retired in 2003 from San Francisco Public Library and have been doing absolutely nothing ever since .”

Shannon Smith, ’19, joined Boise State University as an open educational resources librarian . She recently completed the SPARC Open Education Leadership Program .

Caitlin Stewart, ’20, has been working since graduation as the teaching and learning librarian at Illinois State University .

Jen Stutesman, ’01, celebrated her 20th year as a librarian at a new job as a branch manager at Walla Walla County Rural Library District, College Place Branch .

Lauren Sullivan, ’18, recently moved back to her hometown of Elgin, Illinois, 36

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to become an adjunct librarian at Elgin Community College .

Ryan Tolnay, ’19, is the Global Education, University Studies, and School of Individualized Study liaison librarian at the Rochester Institute of Technology .

Julie Varee, ’21, is working in the library and archives at the Anchorage Museum .

As the Community Outreach Archivist, Julie is helping to ensure the archives include individuals and groups from historically marginalized communities in the story the museum tells about Anchorage and Alaska .

Michael Wagner, ’18, is in his third year as an ontologist at Amazon .

Barbara Williams, ’19, accepted a job at the Library of Michigan as a library development analyst . She reports: “My MLIS has done so much to further my career . Without it, I was stuck in a paraprofessional position without the possibility for growth .”

Miriam Wnuk, ’13, chaired the Northwest Interlibrary Loan Conference for the first time and successfully pivoted it to a virtual conference halfway through the planning year due to COVID-19 . She is also the chair for the 2021 conference .

She is the assistant manager of resource sharing at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee .

Michelle Young (Wong), ’08, was appointed to serve as a member of the 2022 ALSC John Newbery Award Committee .

Stephanie Zimmerman, ’12, is working as IT program manager at Seattle Children’s Hospital, focusing on information security and core technology .

MSIM Jin Ahn, ’09, moved to DB General Insurance as a senior chief manager for its new market development team .

Oscar Cummings, ’13, is working at T-Mobile as a principal systems design engineer .

Maeve Edstrom, ’19, was promoted to Director of User Experience at HeadLight,

an infrastructure technology firm .

Erika Enomoto, ’20, is a program manager at Microsoft Azure .

Tyler Fruichantie, ’14, is working as a product manager at Expeditors International, where he has been since graduating .

Aditya Kaul, ’16, is working as a business intelligence engineer at Google .

Harsh Keswani, ’17, took a senior product manager role at Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure team . He had previously spent three years at Splunk as a product manager for machine learning .

Tiffany Ku, ’19, is a UX researcher at Redfin, based in Seattle .

Paula Land, ’04, is a senior content strategist for the NASA Earth Science Data Systems program, doing content strategy, information architecture and user experience work on the program’s website .

She consults via her company, Strategic Content, and teaches in the content strategy master’s degree program at the FH Joanneum college in Graz, Austria .

Jun Qian, ’14, is a senior software engineer at Everlywell, a unicorn startup in Austin, Texas .

Avanti Shah, ’18, was promoted to staff data scientist at Walmart Global Tech .

She had a patent pending and was expecting a baby .

Ritu Sidana, ’12, joined Seattle based nonprofit SEIU 775 as a project manager .

Oktavianus Sinaga, ’11, is a senior IT analyst at the Department of Information Systems Management in the Central Bank of Indonesia .

Jess Stull, ’19, recently was promoted to director of operations and automation at Appen .

Ph.D. Jeff Huang, ’13, has started a sabbatical after getting tenure at Brown University in the Computer Science department . He’s raising chickens and has written stories about the papers he published while at the iSchool .

AFTERLAB, from Page 11 different visions of a good or just world.

In her research, she has investigated how idealized discussions of data and algorithms can mask more pernicious harms, a phenomenon she calls “data violence.”

Cifor brings an archivist’s perspective to the group, and, like Hoffmann, the perspective of a feminist scholar. Her research centers on how archives and data can be deployed to support social justice movements, and she investigates how archives are influenced by the power dynamics around gender, sexuality, race and other forms of difference.

Finn brings together science and technology studies and the history of information and technology in her research. She has written and researched extensively about crisis informatics, a field interested in the use of information and technology during and after disasters and other emergencies. Her 2018 book, “Documenting Aftermath,” looked at information and communication practices after three historical California earthquakes and how information infrastructures shaped the experiences of people who lived through them.

Finn said she sees the lab filling a niche for students who are interested in topics at the intersection of information science and critical social sciences.

“We want to create an environment where students feel they can take on big, difficult research questions that might take them a little bit of time and feel like they’ll have the support of peers and professors,” Finn said.

AfterLab got its official launch with a project funded by the iSchool Strategic Research Fund. The researchers, with assistance from iSchool Ph.D. student Sarah Nguyễn, are studying the role of data in the ways institutions represent COVID-19 and its effects — especially relative to race and gender. Finn also is the lead researcher on a project that recently received an NSF grant and a grant from the “digital infrastructures” project sponsored by the Sloan Foundation, Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and Omidyar Networks. Her team is studying the work of producing COVID-19 data infrastructures in the U.S. and India.

Learn more about AfterLab at afterlab.ischool.uw.edu.

Achievements Daniel Chen, a senior doublemajoring in Informatics and MicroDaniel Chen biology at the UW, was named a 2021 Goldwater Scholar . Chen is one of 410 undergraduate students selected for the award across the country . The scholarships are granted to undergraduates who show exceptional promise and plan to pursue research careers in math, engineering or the natural sciences .

The American Library Association awarded Spectrum Scholarships to two MLIS students, Truc Ho and Kaitlin Srader .

The Spectrum program is intended to increase diversity in the profession through recruitment and scholarships .

Truc Ho

Kaitlin Srader

Dean Anind K. Dey and colleagues from his previous institution, Carnegie Mellon University, received a 10year Impact Award from Ubicomp, the leading conference on pervasive and ubiquitous computing . Their paper, “Understanding My Data, Myself: Supporting Self-Reflection with Ubicomp Technologies,” examined the questions people ask about their personal data .

Professor Amy J. Ko was recognized in 2021 with an honorable mention in the UW Awards Amy J. Ko of Excellence, which celebrate outstanding faculty, staff, students and alumni whose achievements exemplify the University’s mission . Ko’s recognition came in the Marsha L . Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award category . Named for the late Graduate School dean, the award

has been given to standout faculty mentors annually since 1999 .

Assistant Teaching Professor Sandy Littletree was elected to a four-year Sandy term on the IndigeLittletree nous Matters Section of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, beginning August 2021 .

Assistant Professor Tanu Mitra was awarded the Adamic-Glance Distinguished Young Tanu Mitra Researcher Award at the 2021 International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media .

This award is presented annually to a young researcher who has distinguished themself through innovative work in the area of computational social science at an early stage of their independent research career .

Professor Hans Jochen Scholl was named a “Fellow of the Digital Government Society,” which Hans Jochen honors exceptional Scholl and groundbreaking contributions to the study of digital government . The Digital Government Society, of which Scholl was a founding member in 2005 and for which he served as president from 2009-10, is an association of hundreds of scholars worldwide .

Associate Professor Chirag Shah was elected chair of the newly formed ASIS&T Special Interest Group (SIG) AI . SIG AI provides a forum for discussion about research, development and use of artificial intelligence in information science and technology . Its interest areas include AI ethics, algorithmic bias, human-AI interaction and other aspects of AI design and implementation .

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FACULTY | New to the iSchool

Aylin Caliskan specializes in ethical artificial intelligence

DISRUPTING BIAS IN AI

By Mary Lynn Lyke Can machines be sexist? Researcher Aylin Caliskan found out the answer when she entered “O bir profesör, O bir öğretmen” into Google Translate on her computer. “O” is a gender-neutral pronoun in Turkish; it can mean “she,” “he” or “it.” The Google program, powered by statistical machine translation algorithms, translated the Turkish sentences as “He is a professor. She is a teacher.”

The gender-biased response was not an anomaly, she found. As they process massive language datasets, rapidly learning as they go, artificial intelligence (AI) programs tend to associate female terms — she, her, sister, daughter, mother, grandmother — with arts and family. They link male terms with science, mathematics, power and career.

“This is the way AI perceives the world,” says Caliskan, who joined the iSchool faculty this fall as an assistant professor specializing in the emerging field of AI ethics.

Sexism, racism, ageism, ableism and LGBTQ discrimination are rapidly spreading through such everyday, big-tech tools as text generation, voice assistance, translation and information retrieval, warns Caliskan. “Machines are replicating, perpetuating and amplifying these biases, yet no regulation is in place to audit them.”

Caliskan joined the UW’s new Responsible AI Systems & Experiences team, a research group investigating how intelligent information systems interact with human society. “These researchers are world leaders in the field,” she says. “It is extremely humbling to be part of it.”

She has been following research at the iSchool for more than a decade, starting with Professor Batya Friedman’s foundational paper tracking bias in computer systems in the late ’90s. “The iSchool is home to the first Photo by Doug Parry

CALISKAN, continued on Page 42 38

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FACULTY | New to the iSchool

Let storytellers be the guide

By Jim Davis For Lindah Kotut, it sounded like a fine excuse for tea. Traveling to a conference in Namibia in southern Africa in 2019, Kotut wondered what people who aren’t online think about the online world. So, she decided to ask them.

Kotut, who was pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science at Virginia Tech, arranged to interview village elders in Namibia and her home country of Kenya who had never used a computer.

Turns out, they do have strong opinions about their privacy and security online, about how they’re represented and how their stories are told in the digital world.

This became a life-changing moment for Kotut, who made her dissertation about this tension between the online and offline worlds. The new assistant professor at the Information School thinks that this should be a priority for people pushing the frontiers of computer science.

“When you build the next system, it should become almost a default question to ask, ‘Who have you talked to about this?’” Kotut said. “How is it affecting people outside of your circle?

How is it affecting someone who doesn’t have power?”

Her academic advisor at Virginia Tech, Scott McCrickard, noted how she looked at Kenyan museums and how they capture and share stories compared with villages and their oral traditions.

“She explored the comfort levels of the elders there with regard to what is it

Lindah Kotut explores how digital spaces affect communities with oral traditions — and how stories can shape technology

that they’re OK with sharing and what is it that will go to the grave with them,” said McCrickard, an associate professor of computer science.

Kotut’s interest in computer science began when she was growing up in Kenya. Her father had a subscription to Reader’s Digest and the stories that interested her the most were about computers. After high school, Kotut decided to study abroad for the opportunity to learn computer science. She landed a partial scholarship at a community college in Albany, Georgia.

She later obtained a bachelor’s degree from Georgia Southern University, a master’s degree from Norfolk State University and her Ph.D. this past May. After interviewing people in Namibia and Kenya, Kotut was supposed

Photo by Doug Parry

to go back for more research, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced her to scrap those plans. Still, the work made her interested in pursuing research about the digital world and oral story traditions, especially in Indigenous communities.

That’s why she was so attracted to the iSchool, which has a research focus on Indigenous Knowledge and an experienced cadre of faculty with a mission to study the use of digital technologies to protect and preserve the stories of Native communities.

“You have to establish trust, but the best way to establish trust is to work with people who already work with these communities,” Kotut said.

Kotut wants to meet with the Indigenous populations in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere around the world while exploring how technology affects those without a voice in it.

“That vision is what I’m bringing into the start of my career,” Kotut said. “It’s been an adventure so far. I’m just looking forward to seeing what happens.” ischool.uw.edu

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FACULTY | New to the iSchool

‘Interrogator of archives’ Temi Odumosu brings expertise in the impact of colonialism on special collections

By Mary Lynn Lyke Temi Odumosu spotted the cast-iron bank in an antique furniture store in Copenhagen. Made in China, the bank had an onyx-black face, kinky hair and an exaggerated grin, wide, with cherryred lips and impossibly white teeth. It was a modern replica of the popular “Jolly (N-word) Bank,” a kids’ plaything at the turn of the century. Place a coin 40

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in the hand, the figure throws it in the mouth and the eyes roll backward.

The bank was “haunting” the store, says the art historian and curator. “I was deeply disturbed by it.” Disturbed, then enraged, then the scholar in her kicked in and she started asking questions. How had the cast-iron object migrated from the Jim Crow toy culture in America to Denmark? What were children learning from the crude representation? Who

made it? And, disconcertingly, why was there still market demand for such racial memorabilia denigrating Africans and African Americans?

Odumosu brought the bank and the load of difficult questions into her various classrooms, including at Malmö University in Sweden, where she is a senior lecturer in cultural studies.

Students were profoundly affected.

“People say, ‘Oh, the bank is so innocent.

But things change when you get up close, start to unravel its past and see the biased design logic in such a clear way,” she says. “Once you see that faulty logic, you can actually intervene and shift perspectives.”

Odumosu will be joining the iSchool in January, bringing to the UW her expertise in colonial archiving and archives, representations of Africandescendant peoples, and the digital afterlives of slavery in the cultural commons online. She’s excited to work collaboratively with new iSchool peers.

“Even though my iSchool interviews were all virtual, I could feel the cohesion among the faculty,” she says. “I had a sense people really like one another and are genuinely interested in each other’s work.”

A self-described “interrogator of archives,” Odumosu will be deep diving into special collections at the university, local museums, and other cultural heritage institutions, investigating material that helps to tell more nuanced and dignifying stories of the African diaspora. “Archives are not easy spaces, but they can provide openings to make contact with people and lifeways that have been forgotten or ignored.”

Odumosu holds both a master’s and doctoral degree from the University of Cambridge. Her Ph.D. thesis became the award-winning book “Africans in English Caricature, 1769-1819: Black Jokes, White Humor.” It contains detailed analysis of satirical prints circulated among elites at the time that featured a motley cast of characters (from servants to royalty) who were part of a growing British empire under the shadow of the transatlantic slave trade. The comic imagery was brutal, and Odumosu ruled out using some of the most painfully

New at the iSchool racist images.

This refusal to reproduce is part of what she calls “an ethics of care” — a resistance to trading in pain and humiliation. It is critical in a digital era when a disturbing image can be instantly uploaded and the material used in ways that institutions never expected, she says.

As a curator, Odumosu is bold and creative, comfortable with experimentation and eager to communicate research outside of the academy. She and her collaborators have used augmented reality, media projections, film programs, sound installations, mobile apps and performance art to spotlight unfinished colonial histories for the public.

“She is able to bridge the theoretical with the practical in a way that few scholars manage,” says colleague Susan Kozel, professor of philosophy, dance and media technologies at Malmö University. “Further, she can engage in politically charged atmospheres in a way that feels generous and, when necessary, uncompromising — because at times she knows all of us can and should do more, or do what we do differently.”

Odumosu was born in London to parents who migrated from Nigeria in the 1970s. When she was a child, her mother made her and her siblings a set of dolls representing all the different tribes on the African continent. “My parents did a good job of creating positive imagery for us growing up in a socially polarized England at the time,” she says.

Then she moved to Denmark. “It was a bit like traveling back in time to a country where racist terms are still used in everyday language — a country that puts personal freedom above political correctness.”

She is currently working on a research project exploring the colonial entanglements of Nordic countries that have seen themselves as innocent in these histories and shrouded their participation in the slave trade in silence.

Says Odumosu: “It is these gaps, misrecognitions and silences that we are working to transform.”

The iSchool recently welcomed several core teaching faculty members and a postdoctoral scholar .

Julia Deeb-Swihart joined the school as an assistant teaching professor . Deeb-Swihart brings deep experience in machine learning, information visualization and human-centered design to the iSchool . Her teaching focuses on the intersection of HCI, data science and ethics, with additional expertise in computer vision and computational criminal justice .

Deeb-Swihart is a Ph .D . candidate in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing (anticipated Autumn 2021), where she previously earned her bachelor’s in computer science .

Madeline Jalbert, a social and cognitive psychology researcher, started at the Center for an Informed Public as a postdoctoral scholar . She studies how context and subjective experiences influence memory, judgment and decision-making . The goal of her work is to shed light on effective strategies for preventing and correcting the spread of misinformation . Jalbert completed her Ph .D . in Social Psychology at the University of Southern California .

Wes Eli King stayed on at the iSchool as a lecturer after completing their Ph .D . earlier this year . King locates their research at the intersection of technology, religion and gender .

King taught a Special Topics in Informatics course on internet dating in spring 2020, and has developed a course on AI, robots and transcending religion that brings together their scholarship with their interest in science fiction and imagining futures .

Sean Pettersen, who had been a guest faculty member, is now an assistant teaching professor . He brings more than 22 years of enterpriselevel experience to the classroom and has previously worked at the developer, engineer, architect, program manager and executive levels . Pettersen has worked with companies including T-Mobile, Amazon, Microsoft, the National Football League, Nike, Blizzard Entertainment and EA . He holds an MSIM from the UW iSchool .

Melanie Walsh arrived as an assistant teaching professor after teaching at Cornell University, where she designed a programming curriculum for humanities and social science students . She is interested in data science education as well as digital humanities, cultural analytics, literature, social media, and social justice movements . Before her postdoc at Cornell, Walsh received her Ph .D . in English Literature from Washington University in St . Louis, where she worked as a fellow in the Humanities Digital Workshop .

Heather Whiteman, a new arrival as an assistant teaching professor, has a master’s degree and Ph .D . focusing on the science of understanding people at work .

Whiteman is an experienced educator and prior executive focused on the areas of data analytics, digital transformation, and strategic talent management . She currently serves as a Future Workplace Executive Fellow and as a board and tech advisor to organizations focused on “people data for good .” She has been selected as a Fulbright Scholar to Guatemala for 2021-2022 .

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CALISKAN, from Page 38 foundational work that I know of in this domain,” says Caliskan.

A respected leader in the field, Caliskan holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Drexel University and a master of science in robotics from the University of Pennsylvania. She also served as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. “Aylin recognized the importance of this topic back in 2015, when there were relatively few people thinking about it. Her ability to anticipate emerging threats has allowed her to make timely and vital contributions again and again,” says her former advisor Arvind Narayanan, associate professor of computer science at Princeton University.

Caliskan — a math whiz as a child growing up in Istanbul — is helping to develop critical new methods to systematically detect and quantify humanlike bias in machine learning. “Now, for the first time, we have tools where we can go back in time, look at historical data, see how the bias evolves, how it impacts fairness, equity, social structures, and how it is shaping society in an accelerated and biased manner.”

As researchers like Caliskan dig deep into AI systems, the harmful effects of bias contamination are becoming increasingly apparent. Racially biased algorithms have led to inequitable sentences for convicted criminals and to wrongful arrests of African Americans based on faulty facial recognition systems. An investigation of one hospital showed that the algorithm it used prioritized care for white patients over Black patients. Biased AI hiring tools that determine who gets a callback have shown a preference for names more common among white people over those among Black people.

More and more academics are joining forces to mitigate problems before they get out of control. Their role is critical in reining in AI bias, says Caliskan. “As researchers, we can inform policy so that the harmful side effects of these systems can at least potentially be slowed down.”

The work, she says, is urgent. “The bias life cycle is already so accelerated it is threatening our democracy, our cognition, our values, and our social processes.”

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BOOKSHELF

Telling Stories

On Culturally Responsive Artificial Intelligence

19 Stories EDITED BY:

Ryan Calo, Batya Friedman, Tadayoshi Kohno, Hannah Almeter and Nick Logler

New this year from iSchool faculty: Telling Stories: On Culturally Responsive Artificial Intelligence (Tech Policy Lab), co-edited by Professor Batya Friedman, Ph .D . candidate Nicholas Logler and colleagues with the UW Tech Policy Lab, is a set of 19 short stories that delve into the impact of artificial intelligence on the world . The stories offer perspectives spanning five continents in a time of rapid technological change . You can download or order the book at techpolicylab.uw.edu .

Designing Tech Policy: Instructional Case Studies for Technologists and Policymakers (self-published) by Associate Professor David G . Hendry shares a set of case studies from the Tech Policy Lab, designed to enhance tech policy capacity and fluency in a variety of settings, including education and government . A free digital version of the book is available for download at ischool.uw.edu/designing-tech-policy .

Foundations of Information (self-published) by Professor Amy J . Ko is an introductory digital textbook for Informatics, available free at ischool .uw .edu/foundationsinformation . The book covers topics such as what information is; how it relates to systems of power; how we use technology to make it work; and how these ideas apply to design, automation, health data science, democracy and sustainability .

Blockchain and the Public Sector (Springer), co-edited by Professor Hans Jochen Scholl, discusses blockchain technology and its potential applications in digital government and the public sector . Written by leading scholars and practitioners, the book presents challenges, benefits and applications of blockchain in the public sphere .

Task Intelligence for Search and Recommendation (Morgan & Claypool), authored by Associate Professor Chirag Shah with Ryen W . White of Microsoft Research, addresses the proliferation of intelligent agents that have unlocked new ways to interact with information and some of their shortcomings in understanding users’ intent when interacting with search engines .

Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python (self-published) by Assistant Teaching Professor Melanie Walsh is an online textbook that serves as an introduction to programming in Python for people interested in the humanities and social sciences .

You can access it free at ischool.uw.edu/intro-python .

IN MEMORIAM

Beverly Cleary rewrote the story of children’s literature

By Michelle H. Martin When librarian Beverly Cleary began to write for children, she did so because a little boy visiting her library came up to her one day and asked her (with attitude!), “Where are the books about kids like us?” Cleary, a girl from Yamhill, Oregon, had grown up on British children’s books about children with nannies who didn’t reflect her own reality. Maybe the boy in the library didn’t have the “perfect” family he saw on TV; maybe he got into trouble at school sometimes; maybe he fought with his sister. But Cleary, who passed away in March at age 104, remembered that boy and started writing books about Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy and eventually about Henry’s neighbor, Ramona Quimby, who turned out to be a bigger hit than Henry.

Like most American children, I grew up reading Beverly Cleary’s books. Hence, when the University of Washington contacted me in South Carolina and invited me to apply for the Beverly Cleary Professorship in their Information School, I already knew the value of an endowed position that carried that name. What I didn’t know was that meeting Mrs. Cleary would be a perk of the position.

Two days after I started my job as the Beverly Cleary Professor for Children and Youth Services in the fall of 2016, three of us from the iSchool flew to Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, dined with her son Malcolm the night before our visit and, the next morning, made our way to the assisted living facility where Mrs. Cleary lived. What struck me most was her humility and that despite being a centenarian, Mrs. Cleary had strong opinions about things and conveyed her feelings with clarity and conviction. While she could surely have had fancy furniture befitting a famous author, Mrs. Cleary greeted us from her well-loved, well-worn, comfy yellow chair in which she wrote many of her stories. Harry Bruce, who was then my dean, asked her, “How does it feel to be 100?” she said, “I just am 100; I didn’t do anything to be 100” (although those of us who grew up on her books feel she has done a great deal with that century).

Mrs. Cleary intimated that all of the attention around her 100th was just, as Ramona would say, “a big, noisy fuss.” And when asked whether she participated in writing groups when she was actively writing, or if she asked other writers to read early drafts of her work to offer feedback, she gave us a flat-out “No.” She didn’t revise much and when she realized that she was a better writer than many of her peers, she stopped sharing to avoid making them jealous. She had little patience for that kind of envy.

When we called her from the iSchool in 2018 to wish her a happy 102nd birthday and mentioned how popular her books still are, she noted, “I just wanted to write some books that kids would want to read.” We assured her that this strategy worked

Beverly Cleary

then and is still working now.

As someone who benefits every day from Mrs. Cleary’s legacy as a forward-thinking, child-centered, library-loving writer, I am both proud of and grateful for the privilege of holding this position that centers children, their literature and the libraries that serve them. In the years I have held this position, I have presented research in dozens of venues in the U.S. and abroad, have taught students about the value of child-centered learning in library programming, and have cultivated community partnerships with those who serve children most in need of literacy enrichment. I can’t think of a better way to carry on Mrs. Cleary’s legacy than this.

We will miss Mrs. Cleary, but as long as kids keep Ramona, Beezus, Henry, Ralph and her other beloved characters alive through reading, and as long as kids read because of Cleary’s likable, flawed characters in whom they can see reflections of their own lives, she will always be with us.

Michelle H. Martin is the iSchool’s Beverly Cleary Endowed Professor for Children and Youth Services. ischool.uw.edu

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Information School University of Washington Box 352840 Mary Gates Hall, Suite 370 Seattle, WA 98195-2840

KEEP INFORMATION FLOWING TO THE NEXT GENERATION Leaving a gift to the University of Washington in your estate plan can provide for future students at the iSchool. If you have named the UW as one of your beneficiaries or would like to discuss doing so, please contact us today.

206-685-1001 | 800-284-3679 | giftinfo@uw.edu | giving.uw.edu/planned-giving