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Dozens Of People Will Work To Preserve Federal Climate Data This Weekend
Last edited Fri Feb 17, 2017, 09:56 AM - Edit history (1)
Dozens Of People Will Work To Preserve Federal Climate Data This Weekend
by Rachel Sadon in News on Feb 16, 2017 4:56 pm
As D.C. continues to see spring-like winter this weekend, dozens of people will be cloistered inside, hunched over laptops in an effort to preserve another chunk of federal data sets for posterity. ... Organized under the banner of datarescueDC, the two-day event is part of the national Data Refuge Project, which has been working since November to safeguard research that may be vulnerable to an administration skeptical about climate change.
The idea to harvest and save federal data came out of the University of Pennsylvania's Program in Environmental Humanities, where students who were working on a collaborative research project grew deeply concerned in the wake of the election about the vulnerability of environmental data. It was prompted by "the new administration’s failure to believe in science—and belief in an alternative universe," says Dr. Bethany Wiggin, who directs the program at U Penn. "We know climate change is real. It's about as uncontroversial as the law of gravity."
Fearful of mass data deletion, the group came up with a plan to scrape, tag, and save federal data, and began partnering with libraries, environmentalists, civic tech groups, and other organizations to take on the massive project. Since the election, around dozen events have already taken place around the country, and another 20 or so are in the works.
Wiggin said one of her collaborators describes it as a "bucket brigade," where people are working quickly to make high-quality copies of the data and tag the right metadata to make it usable in the future. ... More than 100 people are signed up for this weekend's archive-a-thon in D.C., which is being held on Georgetown University's campus—and they don't have to be experienced coders. ... "Anyone can show up if they have a laptop and willingness to sit and be taught how to do some of the rudimentary things," says Annalisa Dias, who is helping coordinate the D.C. event. There are several tracks for people depending on their degree of technical skills.
....
For more information about this weekend's event, see datarescueDC.
by Rachel Sadon in News on Feb 16, 2017 4:56 pm
As D.C. continues to see spring-like winter this weekend, dozens of people will be cloistered inside, hunched over laptops in an effort to preserve another chunk of federal data sets for posterity. ... Organized under the banner of datarescueDC, the two-day event is part of the national Data Refuge Project, which has been working since November to safeguard research that may be vulnerable to an administration skeptical about climate change.
The idea to harvest and save federal data came out of the University of Pennsylvania's Program in Environmental Humanities, where students who were working on a collaborative research project grew deeply concerned in the wake of the election about the vulnerability of environmental data. It was prompted by "the new administration’s failure to believe in science—and belief in an alternative universe," says Dr. Bethany Wiggin, who directs the program at U Penn. "We know climate change is real. It's about as uncontroversial as the law of gravity."
Fearful of mass data deletion, the group came up with a plan to scrape, tag, and save federal data, and began partnering with libraries, environmentalists, civic tech groups, and other organizations to take on the massive project. Since the election, around dozen events have already taken place around the country, and another 20 or so are in the works.
Wiggin said one of her collaborators describes it as a "bucket brigade," where people are working quickly to make high-quality copies of the data and tag the right metadata to make it usable in the future. ... More than 100 people are signed up for this weekend's archive-a-thon in D.C., which is being held on Georgetown University's campus—and they don't have to be experienced coders. ... "Anyone can show up if they have a laptop and willingness to sit and be taught how to do some of the rudimentary things," says Annalisa Dias, who is helping coordinate the D.C. event. There are several tracks for people depending on their degree of technical skills.
....
For more information about this weekend's event, see datarescueDC.
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