It's Complicated
Wed, 01/25/2017 - 4:00pm
Event
Location:
DREAM Lab

Join us on January 25th at 4pm in the Collaboratory for a presentation by two of UCSB's data scholars, Ben Best and Laila Sakr, for a lively discussion about the complications of conducting research in today's environment. Using and re-using data created by others has become an essential part of contemporary scholarly work.   From climate data published by government agencies, to Tweets collected using Open Source software, scholars from a wide variety of disciplines base their work on datasets that have opaque origins and uncertain futures.  Conducting research that is transparent, accessible, and reproducible is in this environment is challenging.  Join two of UCSB’s leading data scholars in the Library’s Interdisciplinary Research Collaboratory for short presentations and a discussion of how to expand the reach of digital scholarship in a data-enabled world.

Presenters:
Ben Best is an environmental data scientist with a background in marine spatial ecology. He lectures at the Bren School of the Environment at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) teaching Geographic Information Systems, and is launching a ecological data consultancy  (http://www.ecoquants.com)
 
Laila Sakr (a.k.a. VJ Um Amel) is a scholar and artist who uses digital logic and technique to map global participation in virtual worlds and networked publics.  She is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is the creator of R-Shief media system for archiving and analyzing social media content, and the cyborg conceptual art project and performance, VJ Um Amel.