iSchool Capstone

2021

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Updating SPARC's Author Rights Resources

SPARC’s Author Addendum is a legal instrument that allows authors to modify a publisher’s copyright transfer agreement and keep key rights to their work, including the possibility of making it open access and widely available. For this project, I revised and edited SPARC’s accompanying explanatory literature about the Author Addendum and helped create four new deliverables for the information suitable for today’s information environment. At the conclusion of this project, authors who want to maintain their right to share their work widely and openly will have an updated resource for understanding the basics of copyright and open access.
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UW Rowing Data Visualizer

Over 70% of the UW Women’s rowing team struggles with overtraining every year. We built an application that helps these athletes better understand their training data, and with those insights, make better decisions to reduce overtraining. Apart from analyzing large amounts of training data, we worked closely with student-athletes and team doctors to understand the symptoms of overtraining and define rowing metrics to create a training dashboard. Our Rowing Visualizer aims to help rowers and coaches better understand the effects each training has on team performance to avoid the negative outcomes from overtraining.
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Verdancy

Food production accounts for 25% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Research shows that growing your own vegetables at home significantly reduces your carbon footprint. Verdancy's mission is to track the carbon emissions that users save from growing their own vegetables. Existing gardening apps on the market often focus on plant care without addressing sustainability factors. Verdancy seeks to explore this intersection and help users understand their environmental impact through tangible metrics. Home gardening can have big effects on climate change, and Verdancy is here to encourage users to incorporate more sustainable practices into their daily lives.
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Virtual Hearing Screening: Discover Your Hearing Health Today

According to the NIDCD, 15% of American adults (37.5 million) report some trouble hearing, yet only 1 in 5 people that would benefit from a hearing aid use one. Sound Sustainability’s online hearing screening removes barriers preventing people from determining whether they have hearing loss. To do this, we worked with audiologists to produce a free, easy-to-use, hearing screening that has users listen and respond to a series of tones played at different frequencies and decibels. Our goal is to allow people concerned for their hearing health to quickly check their hearing within the comfort of their own homes.
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Voices: Data from an Expansive Christian Community

Voices: Data from an Expansive Christian Community is a structured repository of people, published media, and affiliate organizations that expands beyond the hegemonic voices of white American Evangelicalism and represents a more diverse, ecumenical, and global vision of Christianity. It provides a metadata schema and selection criteria for a curated dataset intended to support further research and analysis. The structure aims to elevate diverse content creators across disciplines who engage in smart and significant conversation about Christianity and its intersections with other faiths, race, social justice, gender, sexuality, and environmentalism.
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Wander: A Guide to Exploring Seattle

With the rise of gentrification in the Seattle Chinatown-International District, the intrinsic sense of community is slowly eroding. However, public interest in these local communities can spread awareness, which helps preserve the rich history found there. Wander is a website developed to amplify the voices of local restaurants and promote the cultural significance of Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. Not only will business owners get the chance to tell their stories about their food, but we hope that visitors will also be inspired to engage with and learn about the people at the heart of this community.
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Washington Department of Licensing Defining Data Domains

The Washington Department of Licensing (DOL) is a core agency of our state government, providing a variety of personal and professional licenses and other legal documents. It manages huge amounts of data about Washington’s people and economy, and its data analysis is crucial to our legislature. However, its data governance lags behind its goals. We conducted dozens of interviews with DOL employees on how and what data they work with to craft a taxonomy and recommendations for how DOL should organize/conceptualize its data, improving efficiency and making the agency more responsive and modern, resulting in better services for all Washingtonians!
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Wave: Real-time translation for limited English proficiency users

Approximately half of the US immigrant population is limited English proficient (LEP). The language barrier leads to stress and health issues and hinders immigrants’ employment opportunities, social environment, and more. Existing online translation services don’t offer further explanation and are often unusable for immigrants with limited education, including low reading and writing comprehension in their home language. Our app bridges this gap and provides real-time, interactive translation help from bilingual and multilingual volunteers who can further explain translations and the context surrounding them, whether cultural or technological. Wave helps LEP users navigate daily life with independence and peace of mind.
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WorkConnects: Your work community is just one connect away

Employees at mid- to large-sized companies are faced with many challenges when it comes to connecting with peers and cultivating new working relationships. It can be intimidating to make new friendships outside of your team, and demanding work schedules can make this even more difficult. WorkConnects aims to foster new workplace friendships by automatically matching employees based on their availability and interests.
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Wrecker’s Report: Shipwreck Diving Laws in Lower Lake Michigan

Lower Lake Michigan – the area ringed by Illinois, Indiana, and parts of southern Michigan and Wisconsin – is full of shipwrecks and other sunken historical treasures. The knowledge of the wrecks’ histories, survey records for preservation purposes, what actions can be taken to recover artifacts and create new documentation, etc., is spread widely across the Lake Michigan dive community. The Wrecker’s Report is a new reference document that compiles federal, state, county, and city laws to assist divers in planning shipwreck diving expeditions.