Jake Tompkins

Intellectual Statement

The theory I have learned and the technical skills I have cultivated in the Digital Humanities Program at UCLA have helped me think critically about an interdisciplinary field of social sciences and computing known as crisis informatics. My exposure to the humanities-based approaches to data visualization, GIS, design, text mining and analysis have revealed how information production and data collection about crises from social media can be leveraged for decision-making and intervention. The projects I have completed during my time in the Digital Humanities Program have synthesized critical information theory learned in the Master of Library and Information Science Program with the initiatives and values engendered by digital humanists.

Crisis informatics researchers leverage information and communication technologies to answer difficult questions about crisis response and gather insights about human experiences during crisis. This information is captured through methods of data mining, and relies on popular research methods pioneered in the digital humanities including distant reading, distributed knowledge production, and data visualization techniques. These methods supported many of the projects I completed during my time in the Digital Humanities Program, including my research on the #EndSARS movement through social media analytics and the prototypes that I designed for Disastr.gov and The Amplification Project using the human-centered design process.

This process is heavily emphasized in user experience research and design, which helped inform my approach to create prototypes for the Disastr.gov resource and The Amplification Project digital archive redesign. By communicating with users and learning about their needs, I was able to empathize with their problems, ideate solutions, and create interfaces that helped improve their process of discovering information and accomplishing tasks. Additionally, this process encouraged our team of designers to engage in user-testing to verify that the solutions we proposed were accessible and inclusive to a diverse community of users.

Being in the Digital Humanities Program also encouraged me to reconceive how information is collected and perceived as data. The notion of “data as capta,” as coined by Professor Johanna Drucker, has set a precedent for how I navigated the process of leveraging data in my various projects. I grew to understand that although social media platforms can provide a rich amount of data that researchers may use to learn about users and their digital behaviors, this information is actually “captured” through methods of surveillance and poses a series of ethical and epistemological considerations about its use in crisis research.