Open Source PhD on Dr. Nikko Stevens

Open Source PhD: The Dissertation

Sun, 10 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Since my first semester in graduate school, I’ve been posting my reading lists and general themes for the month. Since my comprehensive exams in May, I have certainly been reading, though not nearly as much. I took some time off, moved to the Dartmouth area and began working as a researcher and lab manager of the Digital Justice Lab, a lab in the Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Cluster.

History of Computing Timeline

Fri, 31 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As part of a series of posts that I’ve been calling “Open Source PhD,” I’m posting some of the materials that I prepared as I was studying for my comprehensive exams. You can see the reading lists for those exams here.

Open Source PhD: Spring 2019

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Until this month, I tracked each book that I read and shared them here. During the spring semester, I’m reading for my comprehensive exams and so already know what I’ll be reading for the next few months. I’m focusing on three areas: software engineering ethics, intersectional STS (science and technology studies), and the social history of computing. Once I’ve read all of these, I’ll write a long paper (about 8,000 words, or ~16 single-spaced pages) about what I’ve read. Then, I’ll sit for an oral exam with my committee. Then, I’m done! (Nothing left to do but a quick little dissertation.)

Open Source PhD: November 2018

Fri, 30 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This month marked the LAST SEMESTER OF PHD COURSEWORK for me. I completed another draft of my second year project, a revise and resubmit (accepted!), and got my comprehensive exam reading lists approved. I also spent a lot of time writing and thinking about the Amazon Echo’s role as a provider of legal testimony. Phew. Hopefully I won’t read a single book in December.

Open Source PhD: October 2018

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A deadline for a revise and resubmit meant not a lot of other reading got done. Below was reading required for classes.

Abbate, J. (2000). Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Alexander von Humboldt Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft. (n.d.). #AoIR2016: Opening Keynote “The Platform Society” by José van Dijck. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ypiiSQTNqo

brown, adrienne maree. (2017). Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press.

Cooper, M. E. (2008). Life As Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Crawford, K., Lingel, J., & Karppi, T. (2015). Our metrics, ourselves: A hundred years of self-tracking from the weight scale to the wrist wearable device. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(4–5), 479–496.

Eubanks, V. (2011). Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age (1St Edition edition). Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

Ferguson, A. G. (2017). The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement. New York: NYU Press.

Haraway, D. J. (1996). Simians Cyborgs and Women. London: Free Association Books.

Harding, S. (2008). Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press.

Jasanoff, S. (2017). Virtual, visible, and actionable: Data assemblages and the sightlines of justice. Big Data & Society, 4(2), 2053951717724477. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717724477

Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Introduction. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York, UNITED STATES: New York University Press. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=865693

Nakamura, L. (2014). Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture. American Quarterly, 66(4), 919–941.

Nash, C. J., & Browne, K. (2010). Queer Methods and Methodologies: An Introduction. In Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research. Farnham, UNITED KINGDOM: Taylor & Francis Group. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=554552

Wolfson, T. (n.d.). Strategy Communications and the Switchboard of Struggle. In Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left.

Open Source PhD: September 2018

Sun, 30 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Welp, September is the first full month of the semester and it sure felt like it. This fall I’m in a class on Surveillance and Society with Marisa Duarte and Andrew Brown, and reading a book a week with Emma Frow. Those are reflected below, in addition to some reading for a journal article I’m working on. Next month, it’s back to my second year project and working on reading lists for my comprehensive exams.

Open Source PhD: Summer (May-Aug) 2018

Fri, 31 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This summer I wrote my second year project. As I gathered items, it didn’t make sense to list them all as “read” since I did a lot of skimming and extracting rather than wholesale reading. I’ve just sent the first draft of that project to my committee, but I’ll be open sourcing everything about that project when it’s approved.

Open Source PhD: April 2018

Mon, 30 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This month, I rewrote my second-year project proposal for the third and fourth times. (First and second iterations happened in January and February). Each complete rewrite brought with it a new or expanded set of literature. I also spent ten days traveling to DrupalCon Nashville and the Computing Research Association’s Grad Women’s Cohort.

Open Source PhD: March 2018

Fri, 30 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This month, I spoke at TEDxASU. Preparing for that took nearly all of the time I would have normally spent reading. Oops! In my main seminar, we were assigned a few books instead of a slew of articles, so it’s a short list.

Open Source PhD: February 2018

Wed, 28 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This month I didn’t do a very good job of what I’d tried to do last month - which is focus on only a few things. I read widely for a few reasons

Open Source PhD: January 2018

Tue, 30 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This month, I’m focused on getting a few big presentations ready, and writing a three large projects. I’m trying not to get interested in anything new (which is hard, because there’s so many good and interesting things!), but instead to produce something from all of my questioning last semester.

Writing in the Open

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

i write code in public…

Over the semester break, I cleaned up my filing system and archived all of the writing that I did last semester - approximately 30,000 words. As I was putting it away, and sometimes even as I was writing it, I thought - what a shame that I can’t do anything else with all of this work…

Open Source PhD: December 2017

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The semester is finally over! I made it out without too many tears, and I spent the semester break doing some school reading but mostly I read junk and loved it.

Open Source PhD: November 2017

Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

November was a shorter school month, and was mostly filled with doing everything I could to get things ready for spring and wrapped up for fall. I did a lot of writing for assignments and projects, and made a conscious effort to not read more than I needed to and to instead work to integrate what I’d already read.

Open Source PhD: October 2017

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I spent October juggling projects (many not my own), and found that I was returning to some fundamental questions that I left unanswered (or didn’t answer satisfactorily) at the start of the semester:

The Honest Broker

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Sharing some thoughts about Robert Pielke’s The Honest Broker and whether it’s applicable to technology contexts.

Often, when we talk about science and technology, we talk about them as one field: “science and technology.” We acknowledge the imaginaries of both and then combine them into an even more monolithic imaginary of S&T. However, Pielke only discusses science. What, then, of technology in his framework?

Open Source PhD: September 2017

Sat, 30 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I spent September struggling to stay afloat. The way work was structured, I was able to spend time thinking about fewer ideas, but exploring them more fully. This month, those ideas were:

Open Source PhD: August 2017

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I spent August getting used to being back in class, and thinking about:

how do engineers think about engineering ethics on a day-to-day basis (if at all)?
just because we can build something, does that mean we should?
do engineering ethics stop with the technological product (in the case of software) or do they extend to the interactions engineers have with each other?
why did the engineering profession develop in the way that it did?
and (as always) what role does capitalism play in any of the above?

Below is a list of books and articles I read this month.

Angwin, J., Savage, C., Larson, J., Moltke, H., Poitras, L., & Risen, J. (2015, August 15). AT&T Helped U.S. Spy on Internet on a Vast Scale. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/us/politics/att-helped-nsa-spy-on-an-array-of-internet-traffic.html

ASCE Code of Ethics. (2006).

Barry-Jester, A. M., Casselman, B., & Goldstein, D. (2015, August 4). Should Prison Sentences Be Based On Crimes That Haven’t Been Committed Yet? Retrieved from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/prison-reform-risk-assessment/

Beiser, V. (n.d.). The Deadly Global War for Sand. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2015/03/illegal-sand-mining/

Chełkowski, T., Gloor, P., & Jemielniak, D. (2016). Inequalities in Open Source Software Development: Analysis of Contributor’s Commits in Apache Software Foundation Projects. PLOS ONE, 11(4), e0152976. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152976

Downey, G. L. (2007). Low Cost, Mass Use: American Engineers and the Metrics of Progress. History and Technology, 23(3), 289–308. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341510701300387

Epstein, S. (1996). Drugs Into Bodies. In Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (pp. 208–234). University of California Press.

Franklin, S. (2007). Origins. In Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (pp. 1–45). Duke University Press.

Gusterson, H. (1999). Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination. Cultural Anthropology, 14(1), 111–143. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1999.14.1.111

Hudson, M. (n.d.). Kosovars Who Rebuilt War-Torn Village Face New Threat As World Bank Considers Coal-Burning Power Plant. Retrieved from http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/projects/worldbank-evicted-abandoned/kosovo-war-torn-village-coal-burning-power-plant

Kelty, C. (2005). Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics. Cultural Anthropology, 20(2), 185–214. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2005.20.2.185

Layton, E. T. (1971). Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (1st edition, edition). Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press.

Mehlman, A. (2015, August). The Genesis Engine. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2015/07/crispr-dna-editing-2/

Miller, C. (2015). Knowledge and Democracy: The Epistemics of Self-Governance. In Science and Democracy: Making Knowledge and Making Power in the Biosciences and Beyond. (pp. 198–219). London: Routledge.

Naparat, D., Finnegan, P., & Cahalane, M. (2015). Healthy Community and Healthy Commons: ‘Opensourcing’ as a Sustainable Model of Software Production. Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 19(0). https://doi.org/10.3127/ajis.v19i0.1221

Noble, D. F. (1979). America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pollan, M. (2009, July 29). Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02cooking-t.html

Rajan, K. S. (2003). Genomic Capital: Public Cultures and Market Logics of Corporate Biotechnology. Science as Culture, 12(1), 87–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950543032000062272

Schmalzer, S. (2017). Teaching the History of Radical Science with Materials on Science for the People (1969–1989). Radical History Review, 2017(127), 173–179. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-3690943

Sclove, R. E. (1995). Democracy and Technology (1 edition). New York: The Guilford Press.

UCS Founding Document. (n.d.).

van de Poel, I., & Verbeek, P.-P. (2006). Editorial: Ethics and Engineering Design. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 31(3), 223–236. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243905285838

Watered-Down Gen Ed for Engineers? (n.d.). Retrieved September 5, 2017, from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/06/26/faculty-members-criticize-proposed-changes-gen-ed-accreditation-standards-engineers

Zou, L., & Cheryan, S. (2015). When Whites’ Attempts to Be Multicultural Backfire in Intergroup Interactions. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 9(11), 581–592. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12203

Open Source PhD: July 2017

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I spent July thinking about open source community health:

how do measures of open source project success interact with measures of community health? (they don’t, because no measures of community health exist)
what would a “healthy” open source community look like?
who has the right to determine what is healthy and for whom?
how can we design a study to measure community health in a way that centers voices not typically heard in tech.
if we make communities ‘healthy,’ will they also become safer for marginalized folks?

Below is a list of books and articles I read this month.

Open Source PhD: June 2017

Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I have often thought, “I wish I knew what people in [insert name of PhD program] were reading.” because I wanted to do that same reading. Some courses had syllabi available, some had notes, but it was hard to get a sense of the themes that were being discussed. I told myself that if I were ever lucky enough to be able enter a PhD program, I’d share as much as I could about the material I was reading.