Climate Frameshifts

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Timeline

February 2019

Description

The Trump administration has made repeated attacks on climate science, hitting policymakers, scientists, and the general public alike with a united rhetoric that claims climate change is nothing but a hoax. These attacks have been pronounced in many spaces, but there is one space that is often overlooked: federal websites. In this project, data collected by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) Website Monitoring Team showing insertions and deletions of key climate-related terms on federal websites are imagined in the form of mutating, decaying DNA molecules. As the language on these pages mutate, so do the products of policy and rhetoric that such language yields.

Recent Work

Interactive Visualizations for A People's EPA

A People's EPA (APE) is a project of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) that provides public resources for understanding the history, function, and purpose of the Environmental Protection Agency. In collaboration with Leif Fredrickson and Jessica Varner, co-curators of APE, I designed and engineered a series of interactive exploratory data visualizations that allow users to examine the agency's history of enforcement of environmental policy.

Proxies of Resistance

In May 2020, George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the months that followed, demonstrations erupted across the country protesting against police brutality and racial violence, including in the Minneapolis neighborhoods surrounding the location where Floyd was murdered. Many months later, some of the ephemera of these demonstrations — street art painted on the walls and windows of businesses, demanding justice — persisted long enough into the end of the summer of 2020 for my sibling and I to photograph them. This project reflects on an attempt to document a fading record of a summer of turmoil, situating the street art in larger narratives and experiences of trauma.

Creative Coding for the Web

Many existing textbooks that provide an introduction to programming for the web are designed with programmers and developers in mind. For designers, this developer-oriented approach to programming can feel overwhelming and discouraging. As an alternative, Steven teaches web programming through the notion of code as medium of design, considering the many ways that a sample of code functions as a designed artifact. The tutorials embedded within this work, Creative Coding for the Web, offer a design-forward approach to web programming fundamentals, aimed towards design audiences.

Silenced Histories

The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) at Northeastern University (Boston, MA) conducts research and supports policy initiatives on anti-civil rights violence in the United States. In collaboration with CRRJ, the NuLawLab, and the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks, I helped design and engineer an interactive map and timeline to enable exploration of primary source materials in the Burnham Nobles Archive.

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