In and Out of Place: Resource Extractions from Treaty Lands

In and Out of Place: Resource Extractions from Treaty Lands uses a decolonizing, collaborative and Lakotan-centered approach to map scientific and military expeditions that entered the 1868 Treaty Territory in the Black Hills region from the mid-19th century to the turn of the 20th century. The project is a prototype map tracking Custer’s and other expeditions’ day-by-day travels across Treaty lands, contextualized with newspaper reports, journal entries, and other primary sources. “In and Out of Place” aims to generate interest and conversation among Lakotan and other Indigenous communities impacted by this history.

The project hopes to receive feedback from communities to guide its future directions and offer a space to think critically about the role of maps and other “objective” modes of scientific representation in the long history of American imperialism and settler colonialism.

Contributors: Craig Howe (co‑PI, CAIRNS); Lukas Rieppel (co‑PI); Tarika Sankar (CDS Lead); Khanh Vo (Digital Methods Lead); Audrey Wijono, Owen Blair, Cormac Collins, Dante Cavaz, Sofia Gonzalez, and Colten Edelman

The Rand Lab Data Archive

More coming soon!

Research at Brown

More coming soon!

NIH-funded SFHERE Project

More coming soon!

Data For Publications

This collection contains open and publicly-funded data sets created by Brown University faculty and student researchers. Increasingly, publishers, and funders are requiring that protocols, data sets, metadata, and code underlying published research be retained and preserved, their locations cited within publications, and shared with other researchers and the public. The deposits here endeavor to be in line with FAIR Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).

While Herbarium (plant specimen archive) collections have increasingly been digitized and made available online, digitized herbarium collections remain somewhat inaccessible to large portions of the population—in large part because the interfaces to these collections assume the user has specialized knowledge of plants, knows what they are looking for, and is deeply engaged.

Building on previous experimental interface work, the Herbarium User Experience project (HerbUX) seeks to address this problem by generating a user study / needs document by talking to herbarium stakeholders (undergraduate science educators, herbarium staff, and museum professionals), and generating interface proposals based on the findings of the user study.

HerbUX is a collaboration between CDS, the Brown University Herbarium, and the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum, and is generously funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

Contributors to this project include Patrick Rashleigh (PI, CDS Lead), Rebecca Kartzinel(Co-PI, Herbarium Faculty Co-Director), Tim Whitfeld (Bell Museum Herbarium Collections Manager)

Black Maternal Health

The COVID-19 pandemic is disproportionately impacting the African-American community. A recent analysis indicates that counties with majority African-American populations account for more than 50% of COVID-19 cases and 60% of deaths. The toll on African-American women could be even greater, as they are overrepresented in low-income essential jobs, such as nursing aides, sanitation and food service where social distancing may not be an option. Additionally, African-American women are more likely to have risk factors for COVID-19, including hypertension and obesity. The occupational and health risks associated with COVID-19 may further exacerbate adverse birth outcomes among African-American women, including higher risk for maternal and infant mortality, as well as low birth weight. To this end, it is important to document the health, social and mental health concerns regarding pregnancy for Black/African-American women during the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this project is to gain a better understanding of concerns being shared on twitter related to pregnancy for Black/African-American women during the COVID-19 crisis. We hope to use this information to better understand the needs of Black/African-American women and to inform interventions to appropriately address these needs.

Contributors to this project include Adam Bradley, Ashley Champagne (CDS Lead), Patrick Rashleigh, Justin Uhr.

A Mother’s Cry

A Mother’s Cry is the harrowing story of Marcos’s incarceration and his family’s efforts to locate him and obtain his release. Marcosï’s mother, Lina Penna Sattamini, was living in the United States and working for the U.S. State Department when her son was captured.