Blog post

If you work with geospatial data in Python, you most likely are familiar with the fantastic GeoPandas library. GeoPandas leverages the power of Maplotlib to enable users to make maps of their data. However, until recently, it has not been easy to add basemaps to these maps. Basemaps are the contextual map data, like Google Maps, on top of which geospatial data are often displayed.

The new Python library...

I promised the D-Lab a blog post and then promptly felt unqualified to write it. (I wish that I were kidding.) Thus begins my ironic tale of imposter syndrome in data science.

Who am I?

As a new D-Lab Data Science Fellow and as a doctoral student in Rachel Morello-Frosch’s laboratory in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at Berkeley, I work at the intersection of social theory, environmental epidemiology, and geography. Specifically, I research how institutional power manifests in the distribution of environmental monitoring...

Black History Month, which is observed in February, was established in the 1970s to celebrate the culture and accomplishments of African Americans. Although this designation may seem artificial or unnecessarily limiting (why only one month?), it is useful if it foregrounds the need to better weave Black narratives into the story of the American experience.

While reflecting on Black History Month this February, I remembered how the required reading of Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom by the late UCB...

When future historians try to piece together social life in the twenty-first century, they won’t be combing through faded newspaper clippings or handwritten letters. They’ll be clicking through digital archives that have stored remnants of our real and virtual lives: email collections, tweets, Facebook messages, maybe even Google Calendar entries.

For the time being, preservation of these records is the burden of the user. If one chooses, they can download their Facebook archive or back-up their emails and photos, and maybe choose to share them with a scholar in the...