Directed Study Journal: February 7, 2018
After spending a few weeks organizing my thoughts, I set out this week to start putting together the materials I'll use to research my thesis topic. I've been reading and watching since September but, now that I'm formulating how I'll move forward, I've located and filed websites, research papers, books, films, TED Talk videos and anything else I can get my hands on to inspire, inform or otherwise add to the project. I was particularly motivated to start collecting video content this week and I created a playlist devoted to data docs on YouTube. I think the 25 that I added will be useful but there were a lot of other ones that seemed thin on information or too specific to a particular aspect.
In addition to organizing research materials, I also started to compile a list of potential partner organizations to work with on this project. There are some more obvious than others like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. These organizations already work in a justice and equality framework but I'm not yet certain of the work they do with respect to data, specifically. Another potential partner would be Data & Society, a research group in New York City. This organization is hyper-focused on the research topic I'm working on but I'm not sure how I could leverage their participation. I know they could be very helpful with direction, connections and broadening the scope of my research but it's not clear to me how they might benefit from me. This has great potential, I think, and I'm going to seek the advice of others in the CMAP program.
Another potential partner is a media organization called Art Not War. This is a little "left of center" with respect to partnerships because they aren't a research group but rather a media creation business. They work to create social and political impact media and are at the top of the game. They are a breakaway from the original media and marketing staff at MoveOn.org that established that organization. Full disclosure, I know one of the principle partners at this company and would like to do work with them in the future. Although soft on the research end, they could help me create a great product for the filmed portion of the thesis.
On top of this work, I read quite a few documents this week, in particular some articles on data value and business aspects of data ownership. I also found and organized some additional articles from the World Economic Forum (a deep contributor to the research work of this thesis project).