AO: Building off of the current work I am doing with the Nairobi instance of PECE (RDS), I am expecting to use PECE to be the supporting technical infrastructure for the formation of a collective in Nairobi interested in exploring appropriate policies, modalities, ethical workflows, and technical functionalities for qualitative data and its necessary layers of sharing and maintainance. There are also several groups I have been working with who are interested in setting up their own instances of PECE for their organizations. I would anticipate these possibly being able to feed into the broader RDS "commons" ... need to figure ways for the decentralized model to still "talk" to each other.
I'm continuing to imagine a PECE instance for patients. I've been working with one patient's data to work on a mock-up of what this might look like. See here for an early version: http://disaster-sts-network.org/content/patient-x
I have several plans for how to work with PECE going forward.
Firstly, I want to write about what it means to "be a backend person" for digital humanities projects. Specifically, I want to explore how those "backend" people do work to "translate" (maybe not the best word) the hopes of the "frontend" people into reality. For example, when Kim says we need a PECE essay, how does code and sysadmin work mediate Kim's vision into reality, and how does Kim's vision change as backend code and sysadmin work takes shape, and how does Kim's changing vision change code and sysadmin work. I think this is important to talk about, especially as we have previously envisioned PECE as a triptych of frontend-middleend-backend, but with each tine being differently visible.
I also want to write specifically about the need to develop sysadmin best practices for PECE specifically and digital humanities more broadly. I think it's time for us to explore the people of PECE more concretely and probe how people who may never ever (and may have no interest in) ever writing an annotation or uploading an artifact nonetheless are crucial in the broader collaboration and success of the frontend collaborations.
Secondly, I intend to continue to use PECE in the classroom. Brandon and I last semester put forward a grant for seed funding at RPI (unfortunately unfunded) to use PECE in several new courses focused on data analytics, ethics, stewardship. We had brainstormed some potential courses bringing together ITWS and STS students around these issues, using PECE as the backbone for collaboration.
Finally, I may end up getting interested graduate and undergraduate students who will need coding work for classes/independent studies. I'd like to identify places where those ITWS students could contribute to PECE's codebase.
I'd like to wrap up the metadata tool I'm working on with RDA/Lindsay, use PECE again in the classroom, write about PECE and pedagogy (with Brian, who I worked on instances/classes with, and others that have used it), upload interviews from years ago that I have on my laptop (with EPA scientists from the National Exposure Research Laboratory), use PECE for my new work on/with the Jefferson Project (so far have four undergraduates at RPI involved with the resaerch), and generally work on writing and publishing as a way of making sense of the ongoing PECE project and sharing insights and open questions with others interested in data sharing, collaborative ethnography, experimental scholarship, etc.
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.
One important initiative over the next few years is to work toward a volume on “Transnational STS” that builds on the work we have been doing on the STSinfrastructures platform. The Transnational STS Working Group will also continue to work on STSinfrastructures. We intend to work on the volume with STSinfrastructures at its very core: contributors will actively work with the platform while they are developing their contributions. In addition to deepening understanding of Transnational STS, we would also like the volume to become a space to explore the relationship between print and digital media, and ways they can complement each other in the process of scholarly publishing. Besides, I am currently in the process of preparing another South-South multi-city research proposal that looks at "cooling infrastructures". We indtend to use PECE as architecture to sustain this collaborative research project as well.