Yanni Loukissas on Youth Advocacy through Civic Mapmaking
The Yale Digital Humanities Lab is thrilled to host Yanni Loukissas for a virtual keynote on "Youth Advocacy Through Civic Mapmaking" at 1:00 p.m. EST on February 14th as part of this year's International Love Data Week! Please register through Eventbrite to attend and see below for more details.
In this online presentation, Yanni Loukissas will share the arc of his research over the past ten years to rethink what data can mean for civic life, culminating in recent work on civic mapmaking tools for youth advocacy.
Dr. Loukissas spent the last year working with colleagues at Georgia Tech, Savannah State, and the City of Savannah to develop a toolkit that can support youth advocacy through civic mapmaking. In the context of our data-driven society, this toolkit is not what you might expect. It relies on paint pens, drawing paper, and conversation prompts, which are meant to help kids reflect on the uneven social and economic effects of disasters. These analog tools are given digital precision by Map Spot, an open-source software and hardware system that they made to guide collaborative mapmaking.
Today, kids are often left out of civic life. They have few tools for advocating on behalf of the places they live. What might the tools for youth advocacy look like? This past fall, in a middle-school on the West side of Savannah, Georgia, kids stayed after class two days a week to explore this question. They shared family stories about the environmental disasters they have lived through: hurricanes, heat waves, industrial accidents, and of course the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. They learned about existing sources of data they might use, such as sea level sensors, historical maps, and census records, along with the underlying assumptions and biases those sources carry. Then, they began to draw the stories and data together. They created their own advocacy maps, thirty-six square feet in size, and presented them to local policymakers. Their maps had the power to express how they see the environmental threats to their communities and suggest imaginative ways of mitigating them.
This event has been co-sponsored by the Digital Humanities Lab and the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library.
Yanni Alexander Loukissas is Associate Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. His research is focused on helping creative people think critically about the social implications of information technologies. His most recent book, All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society (MIT Press, 2019), is addressed to a growing audience of practitioners who want to work with unfamiliar data sources both effectively and ethically. He is also the author of Co-Designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor of The DigitalSTS Handbook (Princeton, 2019). Originally trained as an architect at Cornell, he subsequently attended MIT, where he completed a PhD in Design and Computation and a postdoc at the Program in Science, Technology and Society.