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Renee Starowicz, Ph.D.

Data Services Manager, Senior Instructor, Senior Consultant, Co-Executive Director of Berkeley FSRDC
D-Lab
Berkeley Graduate School of Education

Renee Starowicz, Ph.D., has been affiliated with the D-Lab since January 2020 when she joined the NSF IUSE, Undergraduate Data Science at Scale project. Renee’s research interests include Critical Disability Studies, Trauma-skilled inclusive practices and Multimodal Communication Access. At the DLab, Renee is an instructor for STATA FUNdamentals and Introduction to Qualtrics.

How can we use big data from iNaturalist to address important questions in Entomology?

February 26, 2024
Leah Lee
by Leah Lee. Large-scale geographic data over time on insect diversity can be used to answer important questions in Entomology. Open-source, open-access citizen science platforms like iNaturalist generate huge amounts of data on species diversity and distribution at accelerating rates. However, unstructured citizen science data contain inherent biases and need to be used with care. One of the efforts to validate big data from iNaturalist is to cross-check with systematically collected data, such as museum specimens.

Social Sciences D-Lab Celebrates a Decade of Innovation and Welcomes New Leadership

December 4, 2023
Claudia von Vacano
by Claudia von Vacano, Ph.D. On November 8, 2023, the Social Sciences D-Lab celebrated its 10th anniversary with the introduction of the new faculty director, Demography Professor Dennis Feehan. The event celebrated D-Lab’s accomplishment with the outgoing faculty director Sociology Professor Dave Harding. Social Sciences Dean, Raka Ray, offered warm congratulations to the leadership and staff, underscoring the importance of promoting equity in computational social sciences and the support of qualitative methods research.

Black History Data

February 28, 2023
Patty Frontiera, Ph.D.
by Patty Frontiera, Ph.D. D-Lab is excited to announce the publication of two articles and associated datasets on the Louisiana Slave Conspiracies Project (LSC). This is a project of collaboration from many of our D-Lab staff and student researchers, under the direction of Professor Bryan Wagner as the Principal Investigator (PI). The LSC project is dedicated to preserving, digitizing, transcribing, translating, and analyzing historical manuscripts concerning two slave conspiracies organized at the Pointe Coupée Post in the Spanish territory of Louisiana in 1791 and 1795. Our research outputs include (1) complete bibliographic and demographic information as well as (2) geospatial place data that were extracted from trial records related to these two conspiracies:

Using Artificial Intelligence to Help Write Code

February 28, 2023
Daniel Tan
by Daniel Tan. ChatGPT is a natural language processing model that has applications in a wide variety of research settings. It is a chatbot-style tool that was created by OpenAI using a deep learning model that allows it to generate human-like responses to a wide variety of questions and prompts spanning a multitude of topics. Because it has been trained on a large body of text, ChatGPT is a particularly useful tool for programming. This post explores ways to use ChatGPT to help write code in Stata, a statistical software package that is widely used in academic and policy research.

The Geography of Cannabis: Does California’s dual licensing program (de)criminalize cannabis and drive unnecessary anthropogenic activity in remote rural environments?

August 29, 2023
Chevon Holmes
by Chevon Holmes. When California voters (de)criminalized cannabis production, the state’s dual licensure requirement forced local jurisdictions to create permitting programs or uphold prohibition. Many Counties developed ersatz zoning ordinances to regulate cannabis activities and hired staff to administer local permits. As an inspector, administrator, and project planner for Mendocino County from 2017-2021, I visited hundreds of cultivation sites and production facilities where I learned first-hand how two legal pathways impacted the ways in which operators could transition their businesses. This post details a dataset created to track, aggregate, and analyze the relationship between cannabis infrastructure and licensing.

Silence is Violence

June 4, 2020
Claudia von Vacano, Ph.D.

Dear fellow scholars and community members,

We write this statement of solidarity, denouncing the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota and the ongoing oppression of Black Americans.

D-Lab mourns with millions across the country over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many other Black people killed at the hands of police. We denounce these horrendous events that are indicative of the systemic racism that is built into the fabric of our society and government. We call for the demilitarization of institutions of higher learning...

Enjoy the Layover?

March 9, 2021
Frank Hidalgo

Intercontinental trips require multiple days of traveling, layovers, and more often than not, rerouting due to bad weather. While some may consider a storm to be a roadblock, others may take it as an opportunity to explore a new city and its culture. A year ago, a heavy storm hit the entire world; COVID-19 sent us into lockdown. Most of our activities were cancelled. We could not go to work, eat at restaurants, or gather in-person with our friends anymore. That forced us to take a step back and adjust to the new situation. It was an opportunity to engage in new activities that...

Imposter Syndrome in Data Science

January 19, 2021
Katherine Wolf

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, 2021

February 23, 2021
Patty Frontiera, Ph.D.

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...