Design for Diversity, supported by the IMLS, focuses on the ways in which information systems embody and reinforce cultural norms, and asks how we can design systems that account for diverse cultural materials and ways of knowing. Based on a series of working meetings, we will be developing a collaborative pedagogical toolkit to encourage inclusive and ethical practices in information sciences and system design in the cultural heritage sector.
The Design for Diversity Opening Forum – the first event – was held on October 16 and 17, 2017. This webpage archives the information about the first forum as well as important materials collected and created surrounding the forum. The results of the Opening Forum were passed on to the Core Design Group, the primary group creating the Toolkit itself.
Post-Forum Materials
Participant Survey
If you participated in the opening forum (either in-person or online), please provide feedback on the post-forum survey.
Reflection Blog Post
For a brief summation and synthesis of key ideas from the forum, check out “Design for Diversity Opening Forum: A Reflection” by Cara Messina.
Twitter Archive
Using Storify, all the Tweets using the #d4d hashtag around the time of the Opening Forum and that were about the Opening Forum were archived. We originally displayed these associated Tweets through Storify, but the Storify service went out of business soon after. We were able to downloaded the file of our archives in spreadsheet format. Please contact us if you’d like a copy.
Shared Public Notes
In-person and virtual participants, streaming the forum presentations online, were encouraged to add to our group note-taking efforts.
Forum Schedule with Slides and Video
Design for Diversity has made available recordings of the case study presentations as well as the slides from these presentations, where we have permission from the presenters.
Monday October 16, 2017
9:30-10:00: Session 1: Welcome, introductions, and logistics
- Design for Diversity grant team (Julia Flanders, Amanda Rust, Cara Messina, Sarah Sweeney)
10:00-10:45: Session 2: Opening Keynote
- Julia Flanders: “Design for Diversity: Mission and goals,” video
11:00-12:30: Session 3: Case studies: Standards, vocabularies, and nomenclatures
- Amber Billey: “Case Study: Change the Rules,” slides
- Emily Drabinski, “The Problem of Marked and Unmarked,” video
- Karen Hwang: “Design for Diversity Case Study,” video
1:30-3:00: Session 4: Case studies: Challenges of systems and access
- Sari Altschuler: “Accessible Print: Universal Design and Early Technology for the Blind,” video
- Mark Matienzo: “Prototyping the Library of the Digital Middle East,” slides
3:15-4:30: Session 5: Participant writing and synthesis, with discussion
4:30-5:30: Session 6: Keynote
- Anita Say Chan: “Of Data Cultures and Data F(r)ictions: Notes on Training, Transformation, and Decentering Data Futures from Latin American Startup Ecologies”
Tuesday October 17, 2017
9:15-10:45: Session 7: Case studies: Culturally specific ways of knowing, gathering, and sharing information
- Moya Bailey: “Center for Solutions to Online Violence: A Case Study,” video, slides, Center for Solutions to Online Violence, “Research Ethics for Social Media in the Classroom”
- Sercan Şengün: “Toward Design Principles for Culturally Situated Virtual Identity Systems,” video
- Ricky Punzalan: “Why Design for Diversity? Insights from 4 Case Studies,” slides
11:00-12:30: Session 8: Case studies: Pedagogy
- Heather Moulaison Sandy: “An LIS Perspective on Pedagogy: Principles of Cataloging and Classification,” video, slides
- Trevor Muñoz, Catherine Knight Steele, Purdom Lindblad: “African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities Initiative”
- Molly Brown: “Simmons College, the ‘curriculum,’ and me: Seeking ethics of care in LIS education,” slides
1:30-2:45: Session 9: Small group discussion and brainstorming: Framing the toolkit
3:00-5:00: Session 10: Closing responses and next steps
About the Forum
Date and Location
Date: October 16, 2017 from 9AM-5:30PM and October 17 2017 from 9AM-4:30PM
Raytheon Amphitheater in the Egan Research Center at Northeastern University in Boston, MA.
Background and Goals
Our first event is a two-day working meeting in which both presenters and attendees will gather and synthesize existing work in this area, and develop a set of richly annotated examples and ideas in the information systems field. The focus of this forum will include topics like:
- metadata
- user interface
- standards
- algorithms
- programming languages
- operating systems