Community Informatics Multimedia Archive

Last Friday we were grateful to have Professor Stacy Harwood give a talk about her work. She is from the Urban and Regional Planning Department here at UI. Her topic was Connecting Low-Capacity Communities to the Brownfield Marketplace. A brownfield is a piece of land that potentially could be hazardous or be contaminated by various chemicals. Typically brownfield’s appear on the surface as harmless abandoned lots, which make information retrieval about the property complex. In an industrial city such as East St. Louis where Professor Harwood is conducting research brownfields are quite common. Another complication when considering brownfield’s is that currently active sites are not considered brownfields.

During the talk Stacy reviewed several cases she had experienced with her partners in and around East St. Louis. She worked with several organizations including: The City of Centreville, the Dayton-Wedgewood Neighborhood, the East St. Louis Public Housing Authority, the Emerson Park Development Corporation. One of the cases she discussed pertained to the identification of abandoned gas stations. Due to the lack of adequate information from official sources, Stacy’s team went directly to members of the community. Through their own stories and community history, they aided in the identification of over 50 abandoned gas stations in one area. In addition to personal input from community members,  Stacy’s team used city directories, visual documentation, newspaper articles and Sanborn maps.

The mission for Stacy was to empower non-profit organizations with otherwise little capacity to obtain information about properties and help them better plan for future development in the community. Stacy also stressed how vital the issue of trust is when forming personal relationships with residents of any community. Once the bond of trust is established, obtaining information about their community and environment can aid the research process drastically. This is a prime example of how IT (GIS Mapping) along with community engagement can represent positive change through Community Informatics.

I had the benefit of attending and presenting at the 2009 GSLIS research showcase and thought I’d share some of the remarkable work I encountered there. In all Community Informatics had four posters set up in an open sharing session. Here’s a little bit about each one of them:

Click on a given poster thumbnail to see the full poster.

Hui Yan and Kate Williams presented a comparative piece examining government studies of ICT’s (Information Communication Technologies) in both the US and China. One of the challenges in our increasingly connected world is to understand ICT use as it happens on a world-wide scale. Observing differences and gaps in use is an important facet of comprehending disparities as well as emerging trends. So far there haven’t been many pervasive global measures developed but one way to help do this is to contrast the different surveys and studies conducted by individual governments. In general, the Chinese government has administered more surveys and studies on the digital divide and ICT use than the US government and the two have also focused on different aspects of ICT use. Hui and Kate tracked the history and evolution of survey questions and then categorized them on the basis of subject. China asked considerably more about “uses” and “attitudes” and the US inquired more about “ownership,” “places,” and “connecting.” One notable finding was that the US didn’t have any questions that fell into the category of “identity” (for instance if someone identifies as a netizen) or “discourse” (what technology terms people know/use). They then moved to compare these studies to those conducted by two global initiatives/organizations, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and Organization for Economic Co-operation (OECD). Neither of these groups had as much comprehensive coverage in their survey topics. They wrapped up their poster with a suggestion for new survey questions that they felt would capture many aspects of the digital divide and ICT use.

In community informatics we deal with a lot of small case studies and scenarios with specific communities. One of the really critical ways to address needs in a sustainable manner is to be cognizant of the larger socioeconomic context surrounding a given community, of which the digital divide and global ICT use is a significant part. The work Hui and Kate have begun here could lay the groundwork to better inform community informatics research and operations all around the world.

The Youth Community Informatics (YCI) group presented a more general but equally engaging poster. Besides helping to define YCI as an effort that “engages under-served youth as leaders using cutting-edge technologies to address local community issues” the poster enacted as a springboard for discussions about all of the different YCI projects. The group has activities and collaborations taking place in a dozen (or more?) organizations in the different CII partner areas around the state (Chicago, Urbana-Champaign, East St. Louis, Rantoul). Most of their projects involve multimedia technologies and storytelling and present an opportunity-rich terrain for research and education development. If you’re interested in learning more about the different specific projects of YCI I’d invite you to check out their website at http://yci.illinois.edu/yci/.

Aiko Takazawa and Kate Williams also presented a poster exploring community informatics abroad, but this time not in a country-to-country comparative manner, but as a creatively motivated exposition. The basis of the poster was a movie entitled Train Man, in which a Japanese boy (man?) makes use of community technology resources and advice from a virtual community to romantically pursue a woman whom he met on a train (by defending her from a drunken harasser). The concept of community informatics doesn’t exist in Japan in the same way it does in the US, but through thorough examination of the use of technology seen in this film one can observe that many of the same practices and structures exist, just not in a declared manner. The poster uses this as a way to develop a typology of community informatics and presents the data collected for each community-technology site. In all the poster describes a dozen different community-technology projects spanning the four classifications of the typology: virtual, actual, combined (virtual-actual) and organic (adoption of technology happens late in project/organization history) and comes to five substantive findings:

1. Collaborations happen across government, commercial, education and non-profit sectors
2. Community and network building in Japan spans generations, gender, and distance
3. CI fuels a revitalization of regions outside of Tokyo in terms of education, culture and economy
4. None of the cases are just public computing
5. Ten of the twelve cases began as technology-related projects

In general I thought it was a creative way to think about CI. Most of us aren’t unfamiliar with explaining what we think CI is when others ask, but it goes back to that epistemological question – if we don’t have the language for something, does it exist? While I won’t venture to tackle the philosophical debate I will say that in the worlds of academe and research this is largely the case. Much of the time our efforts are just to name practices and social forces as a compelling first step to understanding them. For all of the flaws of language and boundary objects such enterprises are crucial, and often can be accomplished through alternative mediums, in this case a movie and an innovative study.

And then there was our (Jeff Ginger, Navadeep Khanal, Adam Kehoe, Damian Duffy) poster. I’d feel brash giving it too much attention so I’ll just plot out a short summary. One of the things the designers noticed is that research methods in community informatics are not all that well defined. We decided it would be a good way to help give the poster a little sustainability by pitching our take on methods in CI. It goes a little something like this:

• At root we find ourselves most often housed in participatory-action research. “Our toolbox is one of pragmatism and progress, typified by studies which are conducted with the community (collaboration), for the community (may they always access the insights and reap the rewards), and by the community (citizen scientists and community member-led projects). In effect our work is interdisciplinary, multi-method, and inherently critical, a diverse and flexible portfolio of what works (pragmatism!), involving deductive and inductive techniques and data collection ranging from ethnography to statistics to content analysis to interviews.”
• One helpful perspective we often employ is to look at things from the microsocial perspective – small case studies, community groups and individuals who have experiences. A powerful framework to look at this with is the Inquiry-Cycle: asking a question (usually problem-oriented), investigating, creating (a project, movement, event, or other response), discussing, and reflecting. Chip Bruce explains this futher.
• This process usually requires an understanding of the larger social-historical context, which is where cyberpower can come in to play – a way of making sense of how individuals, groups, and ideologies are related to power and positionality in society and how technology can influence this dynamic. We often think about this as the digital divide, but the topic also includes issues of democracy and control/access/organization of information. Much of the ideology encountered here can be found in the literature Abdul Alkalimat and Kate Williams have put out on Cyberorganizing.

For the extent of the poster we outlined several example projects, including activism and creative uses of media, technology education and youth engagement, and use of technology resources, systems and metrics that enable community groups to establish and manage themselves. We found that there were some pervading (and intersectional) strategies throughout, including (but not limited to!) storytelling with multimedia, relationship building, community memory, continuing (or continous!) education and knowledge sharing. We also took a little space and effort to explain the types of settings and audiences these CII projects have worked with now and in the future.

So that just about warps it.  I’m sure any of the poster presenters would appreciate feedback, so feel free to give us responses or ask questions in the comments.  In particular if you’d like to challenge or add on to the picture of methods in CI that I painted above, by all means, comment.

Thanks to CII and the CI lab group for supporting such good research!

Apologies for those who have already heard me share these thoughts in other classes and conversations, but thought I would go ahead and post them here to hear what you all have to say!

I recently gave a presentation in my Community Engagement class with Taylor Willingham on research I am doing regarding organizing around the Jena 6.  In the presentation I talked about a recent talk I attended with Dr. Vandana Shiva, who was here visiting Chicago a few weeks ago.  In her talk Dr. Shiva referenced some work she is doing with indigenous women in rural India to preserve organic seeds that ought to be being harvested (as opposed to the awful genetically-modified seeds they are being forced to harvest by major companies such as Kraft and Monsanto).  What struck me when she made this small comment was that she referred to the practice and methodology of their seedbank as ‘open-source.’  I liked that she did that because, for me, it serves as a reminder that the power of these emerging technologies that we talk about so much in CI lies not in the actual technology, but rather in the idea or concept driving that technology.   In my presentation I went on to talk about how this relates to community organizing as well – that the power isn’t in the victories we win for communities (a new library, affordable housing policies, etc.) but that the power of organizing lies in shifting ideas.  That shifting happens I think on an individual transformative level (I think of oppressed peoples learning to understand themselves as leaders and agents of change) as well as on a collective level (that is working together as stakeholders to craft a vision of a just world).  It makes me think a lot of Jane Addams actually and how the premise of her work was really based on the idea of creating universal brotherhood.   Over and over we see that it’s not the tools, but the ideas that really create meaningful change.

Also I was recently inspired by a recent email conversation with Chip where he reminded me of Adam Bank’s book Race, Rhetoric and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground which also feels relevant to this post in two ways.  One he uses a broader definition of ‘technology’ and specifically talks about language as a technology.  He also talks about (and this supports the lecture we heard Lisa Lee give at the Hull House Museum which Natalie posted about) how even though use of technology has been explicitly used to further oppress African-Americans (and I would argue other marginalized peoples), that folks have always found ways to ‘flip the script’ and use these technologies to further their own liberation work.  Again this demonstrates that the power is not in the technology but rather our ideas and how our ideas shape and move these tools in our community work.

This all sounded a lot better in my presentation, but hopefully it still makes sense ☺

PS – Here’s a quote from Banks that I think is really fitting:

Our only hope for a technology access worth having, for a nation worth living in, lies in our renewed passion for that struggle, our renewed commitment to the jeremiadic vision of a nation and its technologies transformed by the dogged insistence that they live up to the nobility in ideals that made those dry bits and wires and bones walk in the first place.  Just as rhetors throughout those traditions have always argued that race and our ability to solve the present problems and continuing legacies of racism are the test of our democratic experiment, eliminating racism and racialized exclusions are also the test of our grand technological experiment.  (Banks, 2005)