From developing news stories to fake news, satirical posts to outright deceitful information, there is a lot of misinformation out there. For students and young adults, it can be difficult to understand how these revolve around your life and how they impact you. Alongside the Center for an Informed Public, we set out to build a supplemental educational platform that teaches high school and college-age students about how misinformation impacts their life in an interactive, reflective, and engaging way.

“Collections as data” (CaD) goes beyond traditional archival practices to analyze cultural heritage collections that support computationally-driven research. We analyzed George Mason University’s (GMU) Special Collections Resource Center’s (SCRC) procedures and metadata, drafted a report for the SCRC, and presented our findings. The team liaised between the SCRC and GMU’s Digital Scholarship Center (DiSC), a stakeholder in CaD initiatives and digital scholarship. This project modified SCRC’s workflows, procedures, and standards, improving accessibility to data-driven digital scholarship. The emerging strategic partnership between the SCRC and DiSC will provide researchers with new opportunities to interact with special collections materials.

Community Credit Lab (CCL) partners with non-profits and other organizations to create and source custom loan programs for disadvantaged communities. However, the in-person training and onboarding process for partners can be time and resource-intensive, bottlenecking the number of communities CCL can help. Community Credit Lab Courses (CCL Courses) is a custom proprietary online training and onboarding platform for Community Credit Lab (CCL) partnerships. This platform enables CCL to generate and publish training course materials, which can then be consumed by prospective partners. In this way, CCL can flexibly deliver pertinent information to their partners using a centralized and persistent platform.

Lincoln County Library District was formed to extend city library services to residents of unincorporated regions of Lincoln County. A community profile evaluates the extent of existing rural LCLD library services and their utilization rates. It also establishes population dispersals, best practices for communicating with user groups (including languages and platforms), and capacity for service adjustment or expansion. This profile informed the design of a community feedback campaign including survey questions, modes of distribution, and location targets. The feedback collected will allow for the deliberate allocation of funds and strategic expansion of library services to remote areas of Lincoln County.

With the current public health crisis of COVID-19 at hand, some communities in the King County area are at a higher risk and are more vulnerable to the effects of this pandemic. CounterCOVID is a risk assessment tool that assists these communities by reducing misinformation and easing their fears through a targeted and personalized approach. CounterCOVID takes in symptom information from the user and returns personalized information about the next best steps, with a focus on the King County area. The goal is to be a reliable and centralized tool for King County residents, specifically the at-risk communities.

With the current public health crisis of COVID-19 at hand, some communities in the King County area are at a higher risk and are more vulnerable to the effects of this pandemic. CounterCOVID is a risk assessment tool that assists these communities by reducing misinformation and easing their fears through a targeted and personalized approach. CounterCOVID takes in symptom information from the user and returns personalized information about the next best steps, with a focus on the King County area. The goal is to be a reliable and centralized tool for King County residents, specifically the at-risk communities.

Our capstone is for UW's Sephardic Studies Digital Library. It focuses on the research needed for launching a crowdsourced transcription site for the 400+ digitized materials in Ladino, Sephardic Jews' endangered language, housed in their Digital Library. Our goal is to offer a place for the global Sephardic community and researchers to have access to Sephardic cultural heritage. We explored various transcription platforms to write a paper for best practices and created assessment and rubric sheets to better inform our sponsor. This results in the Sephardic Studies Program having the research complete before making design decisions for their transcription platform.

Developing data literacy skills at a young age can dramatically improve workforce preparedness. However, not all middle schoolers are being taught data literacy. Through our user research, we learned that students are much more likely to learn these important skills if the data being used is directly related to their daily lives. Therefore, our team created Data Diary, a tool that helps build data visualizations that use data that is directly based on student-provided data. Data Diary teaches data literacy by gamifying the process of data collection and data analysis to increase student interest and participation.

As technology continues to integrate into everyday life, data is becoming a normal part of library staff workflows. However, the technical skills needed to efficiently use this valuable data are not necessarily a part of current library staff training. To help fill this skill gap, two 1.5-hour workshops on Tidy Data and the tool OpenRefine and plans for a third workshop on Python were developed. These workshops introduce best practices for structuring and cleaning data in spreadsheets for further analysis. Using skills learned in these workshops, library staff can work with data more efficiently and finish projects faster and easier.

The ability to read, analyze, and question data is becoming so crucial in today’s workforce and is considered a 21st century technical skill across all industries. However, our current education systems utilize traditional curriculum methods that fail to provide students with the comprehensive skills to interact with digital information. Data Viz Kids is a free interactive and interdisciplinary curriculum for middle school teachers to educate and bring data literacy into classrooms. Through the five modules, teachers will cover a wide range of data literacy skills in order to better prepare their students for higher education and the workforce.