I actually don't really understand projects and their significance. How are they different from groups? And where are they represented under the menu -- Analyze, Collaborate, Discover? On The Asthma Files, my book "project" is in there somewhere, spread out across all the 6+Cities groups, and the two classes. But I'm not sure how projects would help me highlight that.
Part of the problem is that I have not just kept up with PECE updates -- I didn't realize that multiple people can work on PECE essays now, for example, and that it was possible to post videos. I'm wondering if we could have a monthly or quarterly video call with updates?
When I read this question I ask myself: Do they mean PECE infrastructure including TAF, DSTS, and STS Infrastructures? Or do they just mean this PECE instance? If the latter, I have not used this instance of PECE much at all, except as a very very seldom reference point. I’m hoping to use world pece for the PECE for Pedagogy project.
But if you mean the former. I have used STS Infrastructures for the STS Across Borders project. With Eliza Nobles (now a Drexel alum), we built Animating STS @ Drexel University in 2018. I have also used DSTS for the Writing Slow Disaster workshop which was held as part of the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s first virtual meeting. This workshop was designed with Tim Neale and facilitated at Drexel University with Scott Knowles. We used this space to post readings for workshop participants and artifacts in advance of the meeting. We were supposed to add material from the workshop after the event, and continue working with it, but we never did. Maybe that’s still possible.
I have used The Asthma Files the most out of all four platforms. I have used TAF for my research in Philadelphia, using the 6+Cities groups. I have used TAF to teach two classes, Philadelphia Civic Field School, which was a four week, 300-level special topics course taught at Drexel; and Philadelphia in a Changing Climate, which was a STS graduate lab course taught in spring 2017. I have had somewhere between 24-30 Drexel students work on the platform over the years, between these two classes and RA-ships. I have also set up four groups there that I don’t use that much 1) Knoxville, 2) Urban Climate Action and Research, 3) Housing Philadelphia, and 4) Mobile Asthma Apps. I have added artifacts to these groups over the years, but haven’t done much beyond that. I have created a number of analytics, such as the 'Data in Service' analytic and the profiling a climate policy analytic for Urban Climate Action and Research.
Going forward I hope to use PECE for four different projects I’m working on: 1) The energy vulnerability project in the Mid-Atlantic, which we have now set up housingenergy.info for; 2) My second book project on late industrialism in Philadelphia - I will continue to use the 6+ Cities Philadelphia spaces, and also my course groups to store and analyze data for this project; 3) PECE for Pedagogy is a new project that I’m looking forward to working on; and finally 4) I would be interested in using PECE for my climate change work. Right now, we have set up a public facing site at climatereadyphilly.org to get some of our cooked findings out into the world, as well as our workshop materials, but I’m wondering if PECE could serve as a project archive. There is additional climate change work I’m doing as well.
In the past I have mostly used PECE for storage — archiving and sharing material. Moving forward, I’m interested in using the analytics and PECE essays in a more structured and robust way. Even just using the PECE essay with Atharva Bhagwat and Skylar Ricci these past two weeks, I could easily imagine using this tool to help move my book and reports forward. Critically, however, I can’t imagine using PECE and its tools if I’m not working on a collaborative project; if I’m not trying to do analysis with others.