Capstone Projects | Information School | University of Washington

The P21 Problem: Proposing a More Ethical Best Practice for Sex and Gender in Wikidata

P21 is a metadata property field used in Wikidata to record the sex or gender of living and non-living humans, animals, and fictional characters. This field conflates sex, gender identity, and gender modality, and may violate the consent and privacy of living people. There is no consensus or established guidelines for its use. My report proposes a set of more ethical best practices for using P21, as well as an implementation plan and set of use cases for this plan for using P21 for living people. This report aids in harm mitigation caused by Wikidata editors who misgender living people.

The Poison Book Project: Arsenic In Victorian-Era Bookcloth At The University of Washington Libraries

Building upon the work of the “Poison Book Project,” I worked with the University of Washington Libraries to investigate the presence of the toxic pigment "emerald green" (copper acetoarsenite) in Victorian-era bookcloth published between the 1840s and 1860s. After extensively searching UW Libraries collections, 50 volumes were tested by the Pacific Northwest Conservation Science Consortium using x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy; nine were confirmed to contain arsenic. As a result, arsenical books are now labeled, and precautionary measures for the handling and storage of such books have been implemented to mitigate the risk of unintentional arsenic exposure for patrons and library staff.

The Recipe Book Compendium: Bridging the Rare Books Accessibility Gap

The Recipe Book Compendium addresses the inaccessibility of Early Modern recipe books to the general public. With barriers such as academic pedigree limiting engagement, these books have remained largely hidden away in institutional special collections. However, they hold valuable insights into the lives of Early Modern families and their knowledge creation and organization practices. This free online resource connects the average person to digitized recipe books and myriad resources to assist with understanding Early Modern material and social culture. By making this information accessible to a wider audience, the Compendium promotes a deeper understanding of Early Modern knowledge practices.

thread4thread: Trans+ Clothing Exchange Web Application

This project improves access to gender-affirming clothing for Seattle's trans and LGBTQ+ community, addressing the challenges they face in obtaining clothes that reflect their authentic selves. Many transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming individuals experience ridicule, discrimination, and violence, making body reclamation through clothing crucial for their well-being. Current shopping experiences cater to cisgender bodies, posing barriers and safety risks for the trans+ community. By developing a localized platform to facilitate the exchange of clothing and gender-affirming items, this project will harness the community's potential to uplift one another, promoting a supportive and inclusive environment for self-expression and identity exploration.

Thrivelution: Creating a Mobile App for Matching Patients and Therapists

Alli Connect (formerly called Thrivelution) seeks to address the urgent mental health needs of Gen Z by offering an innovative platform that pairs patients with their ideal therapists, resulting in better outcomes for both parties. Our team, Psychormation, is integrating the current web service from Alli Connect into a mobile application that provides a much-needed and accessible solution for Gen Z's mental health challenges. Using our mobile application, clients can complete an onboarding survey to receive personalized therapist recommendations, view detailed therapist profiles, and easily connect with the therapists they are interested in.

Transplanting Grapevine: Updating the Puget Sound Regional Council’s Employee Intranet

Grapevine, the Puget Sound Regional Council’s intranet, is a resource rich with HR documents, historical records, and more. However, it is inconvenient to access, requiring VPN login, and challenging to navigate. For my Capstone, I began planning to update and rebuild Grapevine using Microsoft SharePoint. I conducted a survey to learn how staff currently use Grapevine and researched how to build a SharePoint intranet site to meet PSRC’s needs. Utilizing my findings, I drafted a site map and a SharePoint hub for future user-testing. This project will help the PSRC Library Manager build a better organized and more user-friendly Grapevine.

United and Divided: An Exhibit on Methodism and Wesleyanism

This project helps Bridwell Library reconstitute its World Methodist Museum Collection through the creation of an exhibit. This information problem was addressed by researching and writing the necessary materials for the exhibit brochure and the information accompanying the displayed documents and artifacts. Specifically, the essays focused on the history of how John Wesley and other early Methodists were represented in sculpture and art, what his letters tell us about Wesley the preacher and person, and how present-day Methodists can contend with problematic aspects of their history. The exhibit, which will be digitized, will benefit Bridwell, its surrounding community, and Methodism.

Unseen Screens: Preservation and Exhibition of Magnetic Media

Seattle nonprofit Scarecrow Video is world’s largest publicly available audiovisual archive, with over 145,000 titles spanning 125+ years. Many of these titles are only available on VHS, a medium that is highly susceptible to physical degradation. With funding from 4Culture and in collaboration with Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound, my project resulted in the digital reformatting of 40 rare VHS tapes, with special focus on works by historically marginalized peoples and pieces spotlighting cultural heritage in Seattle. The digital preservation of these works will aid in their indefinite accessibility to researchers and film fans around the world.

US Election Dashboards

Our goal was to consolidate metrics across several US election-related projects into centralized dashboards for the Lafayette Group’s Election Security & Resilience team. They maintain several important datasheets related to their engagements, products, and other aspects of election administration in the US. It was a challenge for them to find information quickly, create static visualizations manually, and make informed decisions with stakeholders. To address this, our team built interactive, user-friendly PowerBI dashboards that drastically reduce their task times (from 30 minutes to 30 seconds!), enabling them to easily derive insights for data-driven decisions, and helping them communicate effectively with stakeholders.

UW Global Impact Tracker for Office of Global Affairs

While the UW Office of Global Affairs (OGA) relies on the Global Publications Dashboard to showcase UW faculty’s scholarship and worldwide collaborations, its user retention has decreased since the data source became outdated in 2019. Some users couldn’t find the desired information, such as statistics regarding the department’s global presence and international co-authorship. Additionally, some faculties’ work has not been acknowledged. To address this issue, we retrieved 2 million rows of up-to-date data, improved the name-matching process, added indexing to increase database performance, and developed a networking tool to empower UW faculties to enhance global engagement and facilitate research collaboration.

iSchool Capstone

2023