Dharma Dailey

University of Washington, Human-Centered Design and Engineering, Graduate Student

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Papers by Dharma Dailey

A toolkit for algorithmic equity and community empowerment

The Data for Good Growth Map: Decision Points for Designing a University-Based Data for Good Program

by Dharma Dailey and Anissa Tanweer

University of Washington eScience Institute, 2021

University-hosted Data for Good (D4G) programs provide research, service, and learning opportunit... more University-hosted Data for Good (D4G) programs provide research, service, and learning opportunities to students through team-based projects run outside of normal course offerings (typically during the summer). Popular with students, D4G programs provide the opportunity to work directly with data science mentors and subject matter experts from non-profits, government agencies, community organizations, and academia. These programs fill an important niche—supporting the responsible utilization of data science tools and techniques to address social concerns. The mission of a D4G program can be tailored to support different types of students, partners, and projects as envisioned by program and university leadership. University-hosted Data for Good (D4G) programs provide research, service, and learning opportunities to students through team-based projects run outside of normal course offerings (typically during the summer). Popular with students, D4G programs provide the opportunity to work directly with data science mentors and subject matter experts from non-profits, government agencies, community organizations, and academia. These programs fill an important niche—supporting the responsible utilization of data science tools and techniques to address social concerns. The mission of a D4G program can be tailored to support different types of students, partners, and projects as envisioned by program and university leadership.

Drawing on the collective experience of organizers running “Data Science for Social Good”, “Data Science for Public Good” and “Data Science for Common Good”programs in the United States, Canada, and UK— this paper covers key decision points in designing a Data for Good program.

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University-Based Data for Good Programs

Presentation slides shared by Dharma Dailey during the ADSA Virtual Meeting in 2021. Slides were ... more

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Democratizing Data Science: The Community Data Science Workshops and Classes

Computational Social Sciences, 2017

Nearly every published discussion of data science education begins with a reflection on an acute ... more Nearly every published discussion of data science education begins with a reflection on an acute shortage in labor markets of professional data scientists with the skills necessary to extract business value from burgeoning datasets created by online communities like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This model of data scienceprofessional data scientists mining online communities for the benefit of their employers-is only one possible vision for the future of the field. What if everybody learned the basic tools of data science? What if the users of online communitiesinstead of being ignored completely or relegated to the passive roles of data producers to be shaped and nudged-collected and analyzed data about themselves? What if, instead, they used data to understand themselves and communicate with

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Addressing the Information Needs of Crisis-Affected Communities: The Interplay of Legacy Media and Social Media in a Rural Disaster

The Communication Crisis in America, And How to Fix It, 2016

As networked information and communication technologies (ICTs) take an increasingly prominent rol... more As networked information and communication technologies (ICTs) take an increasingly prominent role in crisis communication in disaster-affected communities, their position in the broad socio-technical infrastructure deserves closer inspection. The authors examine the interplay between traditional legacy media and ICTs, such as social media, to explore how they together, and separately, meet the information needs of disaster-affected communities. They specifically look at examples during Hurricane Irene in upstate New York.

It's Raining Dispersants

Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference Companion on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 2015

Addressing crises sometimes requires grappling with sophisticated technical or scientific content... more Addressing crises sometimes requires grappling with sophisticated technical or scientific content. To make sense of the BP DeepWater Horizon Oil Spill people had to grapple with uncertain and sometimes contentious, complex information. This empirical study shows that an emergent, connected crowd interacted to surface, share, question and discuss these complexities. While studies have observed collective sensemaking taking place via social media in other kinds of crises, this study extends our understanding of emergent crowd work as collective sensemaking where members of the public assemble and interpret evidence on complex topics in a crisis context, perhaps performing a kind emergent citizen science.

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Journalists as Crowdsourcerers: Responding to Crisis by Reporting with a Crowd

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2014

Widespread adoption of new information communication technologies (ICTs) is disrupting traditiona... more Widespread adoption of new information communication technologies (ICTs) is disrupting traditional models of news production and distribution. In this rapidly changing media landscape, the role of the journalist is evolving. Our research examines how professional journalists within a rural community impacted by Hurricane Irene successfully negotiated a new role for themselves, transforming their journalistic practice to serve in a new capacity as leaders of an online volunteer community. We describe an emergent organization of media professionals, citizen journalists, online volunteers, and collaborating journalistic institutions that provided real-time event coverage. In this rural context, where communications infrastructure is relatively uneven, this ad hoc effort bridged gaps in ICT infrastructure to unite its audience. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective for characterizing these informationsharing activities: the "human powered mesh network" extends the concept of a mesh network to include human actors in the movement of information. Our analysis shows how journalists played a key role in this network, and facilitated the movement of information to those who needed it. These findings also note a contrast between how HCI researchers are designing crowdsourcing platforms for news production and how crowdsourcing efforts are forming during disaster events, suggesting an alternative approach to designing for emergent collaborations in this context.

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Data visualization for psychotherapy progress tracking

Proceedings of the 30th ACM international conference on Design of communication - SIGDOC '12, 2012

In this experience report, we recount how we designed and built data visualization tools for clin... more In this experience report, we recount how we designed and built data visualization tools for clinical decision making in psychotherapy. We describe how a combination of three factors enabled us to build a high-fidelity prototype within eight-weeks: 1) a multidisciplinary team; 2) an agile methodology that incorporated participatory user-centered research into the design approach; and 3) a coherent conceptual framework for designing data visualization for decision making [1]. Elements of our approach and the lessons learned may be useful to others who must design tools to display multivariate data for users who work under tight time constraints and high cognitive loads, and whose skills using data visualization vary widely.

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Social Media, Public Participation, and the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Human and Ecological Risk Assessment: An International Journal, 2014

This research examines how information about an oil spill, its impacts, and the use of dispersant... more This research examines how information about an oil spill, its impacts, and the use of dispersants to treat the oil, moved through social media and the surrounding Internet during the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Using a collection of tweets captured during the spill, we employ a mixed-method approach including an in-depth qualitative analysis to examine the content of Twitter posts, the connections that Twitter users made with each other, and the links between Twitter content and the surrounding Internet. This paper offers a range of findings to help practitioners and others understand how social media is used by a variety of different actors during a slow-moving, long-term, environmental disaster. We enumerate some of the most salient themes in the Twitter data, noting that concerns about health impacts were more likely to be communicated in tweets about dispersant use, than in the larger conversation. We describe the accounts and behaviors of highly-retweeted Twitter users, noting how locals helped to shape the network and the conversation. Importantly, our results show the online crowd wanting to participate in and contribute to response efforts, a finding with implications for future oil spill response.

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The essential internet: digital inclusion insights from low-income American communities

As the Internet, and broadband in particular, becomes a platform for social and political engagem... more As the Internet, and broadband in particular, becomes a platform for social and political engagement, researchers investigate more carefully both the factors that drive broadband adoption and the barriers that constrain it. This paper reports on one of the only large-scale qualitative studies of the barriers to broadband adoption in the United States, where 30% of the population lack broadband access. The primary research question asks: how can we qualitatively understand barriers to broadband adoption among low-income communities? The study’s community-based approach, undertaken in four regions of the country, reveals the complex equilibrium of broadband adoption. Drawing from 170 interviews with broadband non-adopters as well as community access providers and other intermediaries, this study finds that price is only one factor shaping home broadband adoption, and that libraries and other community organizations fill the gap between low home adoption and high demand for broadband. ...

Visible skepticism: Community vetting after Hurricane Irene

Social media enable rapid, peer-to-peer information flow during crisis events, affordances that h... more Social media enable rapid, peer-to-peer information flow during crisis events, affordances that have both positive and negative consequences. The potential for spreading misinformation is a significant concern. Drawing on an empirical study of information-sharing practices in a crisis-affected community in the Catskill Mountains after Hurricane Irene, this paper describes how an ad hoc group of community members, led by a handful of journalists, employed specific work practices to mitigate misinformation. We illustrate how the group appropriated specific tools and performed visible skepticism, among other techniques, to help control the spread of false rumors. These findings suggest implications for the design of tools and the development of best practices for supporting community-led, crowd-powered response efforts during disasters.

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An Algorithmic Equity Toolkit for Technology Audits by Community Advocates and Activists

ArXiv, 2019

A wave of recent scholarship documenting the discriminatory harms of algorithmic systems has spur... more