University of Massachusetts Amherst: University of Massachusetts Amherst Receives Grant from New America to Advance Public Interest Technology Movement
Michelle Trim, senior lecturer in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences and director of the informatics program, and Anthony Tuck, College of Humanities and Fine Arts professor and chair of both the Classics Department and the Languages, Literatures, Cultures Department, have been selected to receive a $90,000 public interest technology grant from the non-profit organization New America to advance the public interest technology movement. The award was announced at the annual convening of Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN) in New York City held earlier this month.
Trim and Tuck, along with colleagues at Bunker Hill Community College and the open-access data-warehousing non-profit Open Context, will design and implement an informatics data-science course, co-located and integrated with the curriculum of the Poggio Civitate Archaeological Field School, Italy. Tuck currently serves as director of excavations for the excavation, which is among the oldest and most well-respected archaeological training programs in the world.
“We hope to use this grant to develop curricular partnerships between Classics and Informatics through archaeological data science,” says Tuck. “Poggio Civitate is a perfect example of undergraduate research, where students get hands-on experience, so the goal is not just to bring students out into the field, but to help pull students from siloed environments together.”
“This project focuses on the issues of managing data responsibly to accurately record and capture context for artifacts, situating findings in the prevalent social ecosystem. As this work places humanities values and epistemologies in dialogue with computing principles and applications, it represents the capacity for Public Interest Technology to include a greater footprint in the humanities,” says Trim.
The data science course will satisfy both the informatics elective requirement and a requirement for the Public Interest Technology certificate at UMass Amherst, expected to be launched in 2023. By operating within the existing framework of an established archaeological field school, participating students will learn archaeological excavation and recording techniques through the process of excavation, increasing the effectiveness of their data science lessons. After learning how to create and record new discoveries in the field, participants will then transform those observations into an articulated, interpretive narrative that may be used for the presentation and publication of their data to public audiences.
Other key aspects of the project include the development and hosting of data literacy modules through a partnership with Open Context, as well as the delivery of a workshop, designed by Michael Harris, a professor at Bunker Hill Community College, for students attending Bunker Hill Community College. Laure Thompson, professor of computer science at UMass Amherst, will mentor independent research projects on-site alongside course instructor Cole Reilly.
The work will be completed in coordination with UMass Amherst’s Public Interest Technology Initiative (PIT@UMass), an initiative launched in 2022 which seeks to provide students and the greater community the skills, awareness, information, and experience to navigate a tech-powered world in a socially responsible way–both as citizens and professionals.
According to Francine Berman, director of the PIT@UMass Initiative, “We are excited about the positive impact this project will have in situating technical aspects of data science within a larger, public-focused and socially responsible context and, through its publicity, increasing student interest in the area of humanities.”