IIS holds the copyright to the material for PECE – Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography – which is an innovative infrastructure for big data designed and maintained by Mike Fortun and Kim Fortun. The most official designation of our important collaboration is buried in a proposal to the ACLS for funding research of environmental injustice globally. For completeness, we post a complete copy of the proposal.
ACLS Digital Justice Proposal
Building the Environmental Injustice Global Record, Connecting Researchers, Teachers and Environmental Justice Advocates
PROJECT SUMMARY
The proposed work would strengthen the workflows, technical infrastructure and community of practices building the Environmental Injustice Global Record, a globally expansive digital archive and collaboration space designed to address environmental injustice in settings around the world. The Environmental Injustice links academic researchers (including students, teachers (in K-12, university and community settings), and environmental justice advocates. The Environmental Justice Global Record runs on an instance of the Platform for Experimental Ethnography, Disaster-STS.org, where collaborators build digital collections, collaboratively analyze data, and publish in diverse, multimodal forms. The proposed work will allow us to update and extend technical infrastructure (that is already widely used), and to train students, teachers and community partners to creatively use digital resources. Funds would be used to support software design and development; a graduate research assistant; undergraduate research assistants; stipends for collaborating researchers and community partners, and partial costs of a meeting that brings together the PECE Design Group (which includes technologists and humanist researchers).
PROJECT NARRATIVE
With an ACLS Digital Justice Grant, we would extend the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE) (https://pece-project.github.io/drupal-pece/) to support community-based research. PECE is open source (Drupal-based) software supporting virtual research environments for cultural anthropologists, historians, cultural heritage scholars, and other researchers working with diverse data (including extensive unstructured data), largely through interpretive methods. Various, thematically-focused PECE instances provide space to archive and curate data, facilitate collaborative analysis of data, and enable diverse modes of visualization, scholarly communication, and peer review. Many PECE projects are place-based, focusing on the complex dynamics that produce disadvantaged communities. PECE has not yet been customized to support direct participation by members of the communities that PECE researchers study. This is the aim of the proposed work.
PI Kim Fortun is PECE Research Director, representing the PECE DesignTeam and a transnational, multigenerational network of PECE users. Collaboration in the proposed work will extend the established digital infrastructure to a new group of researchers and their community partners, supporting the production of place-based, community knowledge. The project will bring both new users and new content into the digital domain
Community-based research and knowledge production is especially important today as historically disadvantaged communities struggle to deal with escalating economic and environmental volatilities — often in contexts of deteriorating governmental, educational and local news capacity (Abernatyh 2020). This approach to research brings together technical expertise with the expertise of those who live in disadvantaged communities and have direct-lived experience with topics of concern, such as proximity to industrial polluters and high rates of childhood asthma, in order to adequately address such problems (Brown & Stalker 2018; Corburn 2005).
The proposed work will build on extensive prior work in disadvantaged communities in California and globally, and with networks of researchers working in these communities to produce 1) a tested PECE-based digital architecture for community-based research projects that can be customized for different communities and projects; 2) a guided workflow through which community-based research teams can customize, build and use PECE-based digital infrastructure in their projects; and 3) discoverable community-produced data that will add diversity to the digital domain.
- PROJECT HISTORY AND IMPACT
The Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography
In the last decade, PECE software has become widely used, with customizable digital infrastructure supporting the workflows, data types and interpretive modalities in what we call the “empirical humanities.” There are now many instances of PECE supporting diverse research communities. Work on the following instances of PECE informs on-going software development: https://theasthmafiles.org/ | http://housingenergy.info/ | https://disaster-sts-network.org/ | http://centerforethnography.org/ |https://stsinfrastructures.org/ | https://www.researchdatashare.org/ | https://worldpece.org/ |
The worldpece.org instance of PECE houses research supporting PECE development examining, for example, data management and peer review practices in different disciplines, and the theoretical underpinnings of diverse digital humanities projects (Fortun et al. 2020; Poirier, et al. 2019; Fortun, Fortun & Marcus 2017). An important thread of PECE research especially relevant to the extension to community-based research examines how data infrastructure projects — like California’s Cradle-to Career Data System — can be designed to meet the needs of diverse stakeholders. Another thread of PECE research examines how community archives can be designed to support community memory, knowledge production and strategies for dealing with problems like climate change (Almeida & Hoyer 2019; Buchanan and Bastian 2017; Caswell 2017; Caswell, Cifor et al. 2016). PECE development has also been guided by the PECE Design Group’s engagement with the Research Data Alliance, where we served as co-chairs of the Digital Practices in History and Ethnography Interest Group 2013-2020. The worldpece.org instance of PECE also houses tutorials supporting PECE platform administration, project design and use (which are used in workshops like this one for Learning PECE). The PECE user community has included students (as young as middle school through dissertation research) and researchers in multiple counties who collaborate deeply to conduct research.
PECE architecture and functionality. PECE is usefully thought of as a triptych, providing space for archiving, collaborative analysis, and creative expression. PECE supports the preservation and curation of many data types, research instruments, and creative forms of expression, with associated Dublin Core metadata (and ARKs, as needed ). By design, PECE encourages data sharing when appropriate, partly by allowing researchers to archive data in a way that makes it easy to open access to the data at different points in the research process. Content uploaded to a PECE instance can be designated “private” (accessible only to one or more people listed as contributors), as fully public, or as restricted to either a small group or to all registered users of a platform. This allows users to digitally archive data in a manner ready for sharing at appropriate times. Users can also set an expiration date for data content, after which the data content is removed from the platform. Researchers can remove their data from a PECE instance at any time.
| PECE as TRIPTYCH | ||
| ARCHIVING | ANALYZING | COMMUNICATION |
| bibliographies | pdfs | word documents | images | audio & video recordings | web urls | data sets | news articles | mapspolicies | government reports | organizations | scientific studies | text artifacts | timelines | photo essays | collage essays | videoaudio | virtual tours |
PECE projects. PECE instances are thematically focused and are designed to host multiple projects that can build on and borrow from each others. In the proposed work, three community-based research projects will be built on the https://disaster-sts-network.org/- PECE instance, alongside kindred projects such as the Quotidian Anthropocenes project and the Beyond Environmental Injustice project (which includes case studies of environmental injustice in over 20 California counties, produced by undergraduate students at UC Irvine). Two other environmental injustice focused projects located on the disaster-sts-network.org illustrate how PECE functionality can be used to curate and share diverse data: the Virtual Tour of Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, and the associated Formosa Plastics Archive both make extensive use of PECE’s collage and photo essay functionality.A new project on the network, the Urequío Infrastructure Archive explores how PECE can be used to animate community remembrance about and planning for water infrastructure in rural Mexico through collection and commentary on family artifacts (Peixoto 2008, Poister 2001, Grossman and Høgel 2020). We envision the Urequío archive becoming one node in an interlinked collection of projects focused on the challenges of rural water infrastructure in settings around the world.
Extending PECE to community-based research. In the proposed work, we will partner with community activists in Santa Ana, California to build a digital archive that documents and supports their work to address the city’s complex air pollution crisis, using this exercise to figure out a workflow and digital architecture to support other community- based research projects. The digital archive we design will include space for a community like Santa Ana to host and interlink many local projects. It also will have space for collections of interlinked projects in other locations, cross-linked across locations to support comparative and collaborative work on shared problems.
Importantly, PECE data content can be collaboratively analyzed — by people both within and across different communities. PECE analytics structures supporting this can be co-produced with community members, archived and made accessible across communities. This will result in a lively, generative space for both local and translocal community knowledge production, in turn also creating new data for the digital domain.
Community Based Research Initiative Project History
EcoGovLab has conducted community-based research in partnership with community activists in Santa Ana, California for over a decade. Co-PIs collaborate with community partners to co-define the issues and research questions, and co-produce data collection, analyses, and dissemination processes with research partners (Burns et al 2011; Viswanathan et al 2004). Examples of project topics include: community-driven decision making for environmental justice; community air monitoring in disadvantaged communities; and a water quality photovoice project. Co-PIs systematically document their projects as a part of a long-term auto- and traditional ethnographic study of community-campus partnerships. Co-PIs have learned that community partners’ common research interests include (a) documenting and archiving projects, (b) organizing project materials for project management purposes and for advocacy efforts, and, (c) to share their experience and learn from other similarly situated communities across the globe. For the proposed project, PECE will be customized to support EcoGovLab’s engagement with the community air monitoring project, which EcoGovLab co-directors have been involved in since its inception in 2018.
- PROJECT OVERVIEW
The proposed work will produce a customizable template for PECE-supported digital archiving and work in community-based research projects — with architecture for specific projects, and for clusters of interlinked projects in particular places or focused on particular problems (air pollution, for example). It also will produce a continually-updated, web-published guide to using PECE in community-based research. This will enable on-going production of digital data by communities, enriching their own work and the digital domain writ large. The work will be carried out in substantive four phases: 1) Design ideation with experienced PECE users: In this phase, EcoGovLab Co-PIs will explore established PECE projects and interview PECE project designers, Alison Kenner and Anglea Okune, to gain understanding of different ways PECE can be used, structured and customized. 2) Design collaboration and prototyping with community partners in Santa Ana, CA: In this phase, EcoGovLab Co-PIs and fellows will work with long-time community partners to build a digital archive and collaborative workspace supporting efforts to address air pollution in Santa Ana, in process building a prototype for community-based research on PECE. Examples of using PECE provided by Okune and Kenner will be used as elicitation devices with community partners to introduce PECE to them (Woodward 2016), suggesting ways ways to leverage PECE timelines, photo and collage essays and other tools to enable community memory and knowledge production. We will also experiment with different ways and places that community partners can be brought into a PECE-supported research workflow: identifying data needs and sources; collecting and curating digital resources; annotating and analyze digital resources (using PECE’s “analytic structures”); using digital tools for collaborative analysis and brainstorming; using digital data to support community mobilization and advocacy. PECE has many research instruments that can be customized and used by community partners, as illustrated below.
| DATA PURPOSE | DATA LOCATION / CONTENT | DATA TYPE |
| monitor air quality and pollution | document governmental responsibility for air quality and pollution | document community members’ exposure patterns | document emitters of air pollution | document community advocacy efforts | document neighborhood change | air monitor data | emergency room data | city planning documents and maps | business (Land Use) Permits/City Archive | interviews with residents, city agencies, and regional air board | notifications from public agencies | participatory mapping exercises | historical archives | tabular data | PDFs | audio recordings | interview transcripts | maps (PDF) | photos (JPEG) |
Throughout this stage of the research, PI Fortun will communicate software development and navigation improvement needs to the project’s software developer, Renato Vasconcellos Gomes (whose time will be staggered to be available at multiple stages of the project as understand of the needs, practices and preferences of community-based researchers is gained). 3) Design Collaboration with Additional Community-based Projects: In this phase, EcoGovLab Co-PIs and fellows will work in partnership with community participants, and technical support from GSR, PI, and software developer, Gomes, to continue to extend the Santa Ana PECE project and add two additional University of California (UC) community-based research projects to the collaboration. These projects will be recruited from EcoGovLab’s network of community based researchers representing 6 UC campuses. Each additional community-based project will have an undergraduate researcher that will be mentored by the GSR to build and interlink their PECE projects. The two additional community based projects will use the prototype developed with Santa Ana and go through a refined design build process resulting in a refined template for community-based projects who want to use PECE. 4) Wide Dissemination of Project Deliverables: In this final phase, we will widely share the results of the proposed work, actively creating a wide network of community-based researchers encourage to use PECE to connect with each other and create a community data commons. This will include presentations at the annual meeting of the Association for Applied Anthropology in March 2025 and a final, EcoGovLab hosted event that shares the work with research leaders across the UC system.
Project Deliverables
The proposed work will: 1) Produce a PECE template that can be used by community-based research groups to create PECE archive and workspace for diverse (potentially interlinked) projects. This template will be freely accessible on GitHub and widely shared with community-based researchers. 2) Produce a web-published guide for community based research groups wanting to customize, populate and leverage a PECE archive and workspace. This guide will be akin to the guides widely used to direct participatory community mapping, organizational development and strategic planning (Van Zyl et al. 2017; Burns et al. 2011). 3) Add community data and analyses to the digital domain, working with partners in Santa Ana to anticipate data types and special metadata requirements (for data to be discoverable across communities, for example). This data will include community-annotated government reports, photos, videos, etc, and community-created analyses of problems, assets, stakeholders political dynamics and improvement opportunities in the community. The data created through the three community-based projects (Santa Ana will demonstrate and enable PECE-supported digital data development in other community-based projects.
3. COLLABORATION
This proposed work will include extensive collaboration with multiple groups: The project is designed to draw community activists into digital infrastructure designed for academic research and will do so through community-based project development at three sites. Graduate and undergraduate students will also have important roles, gaining experience with both digital research infrastructure and the techniques of community-based research (as described above). Results of the proposed work (a template for digital workspace for community-based project and guide to the work) will be widely shared with community-based and environmental justice researchers through the Beyond Environmental Justice Teaching Collective, the Urban Research Network, and the Living Knowledge Network. When appropriate, community digital data produced through the project will be openly accessible, discoverable and usable by researchers and students across disciplines interested in community dynamics, health outcomes, etc, allowing for comparative analysis and collective action. The results of the proposed work will also be of wide interest in the PECE user community and broader digital humanities community.
4. LONG TERM SUSTAINABILITY
Sustainability of PECE software
PECE is built with Drupal, popular and well-supported open source software. All PECE customization and add-ons are also built with open source tools. For example, PECE interoperates with Zotero software for bibliographies (through a custom built interface). Since PECE is fully open source, it benefits from and is sustained by on-going open source development of all the software it integrates. PECE also contributes back to these open source efforts. PECE software will continue to be available and updated on GitHub after the proposed work concludes. The PECE Design Team has committed to ongoing PECE development (and associated fundraising). A well-established, creative and collaborative relationship with REVAX, a Brazil-based software development firm enables this. The PECE Design Team has worked together for almost a decade, and includes people in varied roles: Design Director (Mike Fortun, UC Irvine), Platform Architect (Lindsay Poirier, UC Davis), Lead Software Developer (Renato Vasconcellos Gomes), System Administrator (Brian Callahan, Rensselaer), Community Organizer (Angela Okune, UC Irvine), Outreach Coordinator (Tim Schutz, UC Irvine) and various Platform Directors (James Adams, UC Irvine; Alison Kenner, Drexel) and Research Coordinators (Alli Morgan, Mount Sinai; Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, Rensselaer).
Data preservation plans
By design, PECE encourages data sharing when appropriate, partly by allowing researchers to archive data in a way that makes it easy to open access to the data at different points in the research process. Content uploaded to a PECE instance can be designated “private” (accessible only to one or more people listed as contributors), as fully public, or as restricted to either a small group or to all registered users of a platform. This allows users to digitally archive data in a manner ready for sharing at appropriate times. Users can also set an expiration date for data content, after which the data content is removed from the platform. Researchers can remove their data from a PECE instance at any time. PECE supports the sharing of both data data sets and research instruments, with Dublin Core metadata. The proposed work will provide infrastructure and workflows for sharing data sets and research instruments produced by and useful to community-based research. When PECE instances are retired, data content needing preservation will be transferred to repositories designed for long-term storage. Researchers associated with the University of California can preserve data for the long term through California Digital Libraries. PECE content can also be archived through Archive-It, an extension of the Internet Archive. Future funding for PECE and PECE-supported community-based research: PECE functionality, stability and use has increased dramatically in the last few years, with demonstrated value to diverse researchers and research groups in the interpretive social science and empirical humanities. This sets the stage for a new wave of funding from universities, government funders and foundations, with support for both continued software development and diverse PECE projects. New PECE users in Germany are currently writing proposals to be submitted to both German and EU funders, some directly for software development (to enable text mining) and some for PECE projects (with budget lines for PECE development). Funding can also be sought for particular community-based research projects. Many universities fund such projects themselves to build university-community relationships.
In the near term, we plan to apply for funding from the National Science Foundation (~$200,000, FY 2025-23 ; Spencer Foundation (~$400,000, FY 2025-24); Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (Evidence for Action and Pioneering Ideas Program; ~$250,000, FY 2024-23); W.T. Grant Foundation (Improving the Use of Research Evidence Program; ~$250,000, FY 2024-23); and John Randolph Haynes Foundation (Major Research Grant; $20,000, FY 2024)
5. INFRASTRUCTURE
Many instances of PECE — including the disaster-sts-network.org, which will host the proposed work — run on virtual servers in the University of California Irvine’s School of Social Sciences, backed up overnight to servers physically separated from the host servers. UCI has committed to continue technical support over the long-term; UCI Social Science Dean Bill Maurer has provided his endorsement of the proposed project. UCI’s Office of Research has funded PECE development as digital research infrastructure.
Disaster-sts-network.org is expandable and can support many community-based projects, interlinking them to provide comparative and systemic perspective. Associated costs for new projects are very minimal. If needed, PECE instances at UCI can easily be moved to servers at another institution. New PECE instances can also be easily established with a GitHub download. This option will be described when we share the proposed work with the broad and growing network of community based researchers.
Plans are in place to deposit retired PECE instances and completed projects with California Digital Libraries or the Internet Archive. UCI librarian Dr. Krystal Tribbet, who specializes in community-centered archives, has agreed to advise and support the proposed work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ethnography, the Digital Humanities and Community Archives
Almeida, Nora and Jen Hoyer. 2019. “The Living Archive in the Anthropocene.” Journal of
Critical Library and Information Studies Vol 2, no. 3: 1-38.
Buchanan, Alexandrina, and Michelle Bastian. 2015. “Activating the Archive: Rethinking the
Role of Traditional Archives for Local Activist Projects.” Archival Science Vol 15: 429-451.
Caswell, Michelle. 2017. “Teaching to Dismantle White Supremacy in Archives.” The Library
Quarterly Vol 87, no. 3: 222-235.
Caswell, Michelle, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez. 2016. ““To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing”: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives.” American Archivist Vol 79, no. 1: 56-81.
Fortun, Mike, Lindsay Poirer, Alli Morgan, Brian Callahan, and Kim Fortun. 2020. “What’s So Funny About PECE, TAF and Data Sharing,” Collaborative Anthropology Today: A Collection of Exceptions edited by Dominic Boyer and George Marcus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Fortun, Mike, Kim Fortun and George Marcus. 2017. “Computers in/and Anthropology: The Poetics and Politics of Digitization,” Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography. London: Routledge.
Grossman, Alyssa, and Arine Høgel. 2020. “Looking for a “Now‐Time” in Family Film Footage:
Appropriating and Activating Archival Images in the Present.” Visual Anthropology Review Vol 36, no. 1: 90-112.
Peixoto, Clarice Ehlers. 2008. “Family Film: From Family Registers to Historical Artifacts.”
Visual Anthropology Vol 21, no. 2: 112-24.
Poirier, Lindsay, Kim Fortun, Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, and Mike Fortun. 2019. “Data Infrastructures and Data Ideologies: the (Use) Case of Cultural Anthropology,” Anthropology of Data edited by Jerome Crowder, Mike Fortun, Lindsay Poirier and Rachel Vesarra. Palgrave.
Poister, Geoffrey. 2010. “Inside vs. outside meaning in family photographs.” Visual Anthropology
Vol 14, no. 1: 49-64.
Woodward, Sophie. 2016. “Object interviews, material imaginings and ‘unsettling’ methods: interdisciplinary approaches to understanding materials and material culture.” Qualitative Research Vol 16, no. 4: 359-374.
Community-based Research
Abernathy, Penelope. 2020. “News Deserts and Ghost Newspapers: Will Local News Survive.” The Expanding News Desert, June 22, 2020. University of North Carolina, Press. https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/news-deserts-and-ghost-newspapers-will-local-news-survive/.
Brown, Mary Ellen, and Katie C. Stalker. “Assess Connect Transform In Our Neighborhood: A framework for engaging community partners in community-based participatory research designs.” Action Research (2018): 1476750318789484.
Burns, Janice C., Deanna Y. Cooke, and Christine Schweidler. 2011. “A Short Guide to Community Based Participatory Action Research” A Community Research Lab Guide. https://www.labor.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/A-Short-Guide-to-Community-Based-Participatory-Action-Research.pdf.
Corburn, Jason. 2005. “Street science: Community knowledge and environmental health justice.” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Van Zyl, I., Heike. Winschiers, and Retha. De la Harpe. 2017. “Ethics for the ‘Common Good’: Actionable Guidelines for Community-Based Design Research.” In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, 298–300. C&T ’17. New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3083671.3083709.
Viswanathan, M., A. Ammerman, E. Eng, G. Garlehner, K. Lohr, D. Griffith, S. Rhodes, C. Samuel-Hodge, S. Maty, L. Lux, L. Webb, S. F. Sutton, T. Swinson, A. Jackman and L. Whitener. “Community-based participatory research: assessing the evidence.” Evidence report/technology assessment 99 (2004): 1-8.
Wang, Caroline, and Mary Ann Burris. 1997. “Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment.” Health education & behavior 24, no. 3: 369-387.
PROJECT TIMELINE
| Date | Activity | Outcomes/deliverables |
| July 2024 – August 2024 | Project set up & protocol development | 1. Collaboration Plan2. Modified IRB3. Interview protocol for interviews with existing PECE scholars4. Hire GSR5. Recruit EcoGovLab Fellows6. Set up extending PECE to community-based research project page on the platform |
| September 2024 -December 2024 | Phase I. Design ideation with experienced PECE users A. Interviews & participant-observation with existing PECE users about practices and work flows for using PECE to collaborate with community partners in all stages of research (e.g. questions development, data collections and archiving, analysis, synthesis and dissemination) B. Analysis and synthesis of design research to design extension of PECE to community-based research scholars and disadvantaged community partners | 1. Material from Phase II uploaded to PECE for collaborative analysis2. Work plan for extension of PECE to Community-based Research scholar and their community partners; draft prototype, workflows and practices3. Interview protocol for Phase III research with community-based research scholars and community partners4. Expansion of extending PECE to community-based research project page interface for collaboration with new community-based research scholars and their community partners to extend PECE to community-based research scholars and disadvantaged community partners |
| January 2025- June 2025 January 2025- June 2025(continued) | Phase II: Design collaboration and prototyping with community partners in Santa Ana, CA A. Extending PECE: EcoGovLab pilots the use of PECE with a community-based research community air monitoring project in Santa Ana, CAIterative development of tools for digital engagementSharing examples of air quality projects in other places that use PECETraining community collaborators to use PECEConversation about, “why use PECE?” “What can it do for us?”Iterative development of workflows for using PECE for storing, analyzing and synthesizing community-generated dataSynthesis of learning and work flow development for sharing with CbR across the state of California and beyondRevision of tools and infrastructure for next step | 1. A prototype PECE-based digital architecture for community-based research projects that can be customized for different communities and projects 2. A guided workflow through which community-based research teams can design and built PECE-based digital infrastructure for their projects and 3. Discoverable community-produced data that will add diversity to the digital domain.4. Extension of Learning PECE training modules (videos) for onboarding community member participants to PECE. |
| March 2025- September 2025 | Phase III: Design Collaboration with Additional Community-based ProjectsA. Extending PECE: Experimenting with two other UC system community-based research scholars and their communities in California community-based research networkUse and further test infrastructure, workflows, and tools developed in Phase II with 2 UC colleagues who have long-standing Community-based Research projects | 1. A tested PECE-based digital architecture for community-based research projects that can be customized for different communities and projects 2. Extension of PECE to two additional community-based research projects 3. Revised guided workflows for PECE for Community-based Research4. Discoverable community-produced data from additional California Community-based Research sites that will add diversity to the digital domain. |
| September 2025- December 2025 | Phase IV: Wide Dissemination of Project Deliverables A. Sharing the PECE: On the road to conferences B. PECE for community-based research Showcase at UC Irvine | 1. Conference Paper (Applied Anthropology) 2. Conference Workshop (Living Knowledge Network) 3. Presentation to Beyond Environmental Injustice Teaching Collective 4. PECE for community-based research Showcase, UC Irvine |
BUDGET & BUDGET DESCRIPTION
| CATEGORY/DESCRIPTION( | TIME PERIOD | COST |
| PERSONNEL SALARY/WAGES/BENEFITS | $44,000 | |
| Dr. K. Fortun, University of California, Irvine (Principal Investigator):0.39% of 1 month of summer salary @ $?/yr plus benefits, i.e. | 18 months | ~$10,000 |
| Tim Schutz or other Graduate Student Researcher (TBN): 50% for 18 months @ #3500 monthly– including two summers | 18 months | ~$30,000 |
| Undergraduate research assistants200 hours @ $20 hourly | 18 months | $4,000 |
| PARTICIPANT SUPPORT COSTS | $10,000 | |
| Researcher collaborators (including students) | $6,000 | |
| Teacher collaborators | $2,000 | |
| Community collaborators | $4,000 | |
| CONSULTANTS | $40,000 | |
| PECE Software Designer and Lead Developer REVAS @ $50/hr (200 hours) | $10,000 | |
| PECE Software Developer Agaric @ $150 hour (200 hours) | $30,000 | |
| DIRECT COSTS (meeting costs?) | $5,000 | |
| PECE Design Group meetings | $5,000 | |
| OPTIONAL COST SHARING | (10,000) | |
| Ten Strands contract (K Fortun PI) There will be $10,000 to spend on PECE software development after July 1, 2024 from K Fortun’s Ten Strands contract | ($10.000) | |
| PECE Lab (K Fortun start-up funds) for PECE Design Group meeting contribution for final showcase @ $2000 | Fall 2025 | ($5000) |
| TOTAL BUDGET REQUEST | $100,000 |
EcoGovLab Cost-sharing ($15,00): $7,500 from EcoGovLab will support 1 graduate student fellow with the EcoGovLab Community-based Research Initiative for academic year 2024-22. This fellow, along with another fellow supported through the ACLS grant, will support the extension of PECE to the Community-based Research with disadvantaged community partners in Santa Ana, and two scholars from EcoGovLab Co-directors California network of community based research scholars. $2000 will support an event to showcase collaborations we will have developed and the potential uses of the digital infrastructures.
Funds requested from ACLS ($100,000): $15,521 will support PI, Dr. Kim Fortun at 39% of 1 month of summer salary during 2024 and 2025. Fortun’s effort will be through the 18-month project. $24,183 will support Co-PI, Dr. Lowerson Bredow, EcoGovLab Co-director and Director of Engaged Scholarship, at 18% FTE over the 18-month project period. $30,306. will support McGuire, EcoGovLab Co-director and Director of Community Relationships, at 18% FTE over the 18-month project period. $16,091 will support one Graduate Student Researcher IV for 3 summer months at 50% FTE in Years 1 and 2. $28,228 will support the UCI fringe benefits at 10.1% for PI Fortun (Y1:$768, Y2:$823); at 47.7% in Year 1 and 49.1% in Year 2 for Co PIs Lowerson Bredow (Y1: $7,614, YS $4,036) and McGuire (Y1: $9,542, Y2: $5,058); and at 2.4% for the GSR (Y1:$190, Y2: $196). $7,500 will support the stipend for one graduate student fellow with the EcoGovLab Community-based Research Initiative for academic year 2024-22 to work with EcoGovLab-supported fellow to support the extension of PECE to community-based partners. $13,182 will support Renato Vasconcellos Gomes, the Lead Developer of PECE, to provide technical assistance and support cyberinfrastructure for an estimated 264 hours. $1,000 will provide $500 honorarium for 2 scholars from Lowerson and Bredow’s UC Community-based Research Scholars network to extend PECE to their UC campus and community-based research projects. $10.800 will provide research stipends for undergraduate researchers for 3 quarters to work with PECE extension community-based researchers. $1,500 will provide research stipends for 10 community members ($150 per participant) to participate in design research. $1,000 will provide $500 honorarium for two existing PECE users for their participation in the design research. $689 will support Employment Practice Liability, a UCI assessment on all employees’ salaries.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY STATEMENT
Open software commitment: PECE software is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3, a well-known and respected FLOSS license approved by the Open Source Initiative. The Institute for Science and Interdisciplinary Studies, a 501(c)(3) organization based in Amherst, Massachusetts (Federal ID # 04-317-6123) ) is the copyright holder of PECE and would be the copyright holder of any software and digital data developed with grant funds. PECE software is freely available on GitHub under the PECE-project organization. Software development for this project will be integrated into the PECE Drupal-distro, making it freely available for all PECE instances.
open data commitment: By design, PECE encourages data sharing when appropriate, partly by allowing researchers to archive data in a way that makes it easy to open access to the data at different points in the research process. PECE supports the archiving of multiple data types (including audio and video files, and research instruments such as interview guides), with associated Dublin Core metadata. The proposed work will provide infrastructure and workflows for sharing data sets and research instruments produced by and useful to community-based research.
No infringement of third party rights with respect to software or digital content; software sustainability: PECE is built with Drupal and other open source software and thus benefits from and is sustained by on-going open source development of all the software it integrates. PECE software will continue to be available and updated on GitHub after the proposed work concludes. The PECE Design Team has committed to on-going PECE development (and associated fund raising).
PECE users in this project will be trained to designate appropriate rights and restrictions on the digital content they upload to https://disaster-sts-network.org (the PECE instance to be used in the proposed work), with encouragement to license that content under a Creative Commons license if they are the rights holder. PECE content can be public, restricted, set to expire, or removed at any time.
PROJECT STAFFING
Kim Fortun, Professor of Anthropology, UC Irvine, PECE Research Director, PI:
Fortun has done ethnographic research in many places, examining how people understand and respond to environmental health hazards. A key focus of her work is the data practices and infrastructure that enable environmental health understanding and protection. Fortun has played a lead role in many digitally supported collaborative ethnographic projects (including the Asthma Files, Visualizing Toxic Subjects, and Quotidian Anthropocenes), and in the development of the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE). Fortun also runs the EcoEd Research Group, which builds partnerships between university researchers (including students) and K-12 teachers and students; she has not yet extended EcoEd engagements to California (since moving there in 2017) and the proposed work lays ground for this.
In the proposed work, Fortun will be responsible for overall project leadership and management. She also will lead the design and development of space on PECE customized to support direct use by community research partners, the workflow of community-based research, and the archives needed for community problem solving and long-range planning. She will oversee the work of REMAX (software developers hired for the project) and represent this project in the PECE Design Team.
Summer Graduate Student Research, UC Irvine The PECE user community now includes many PhD students who have extensive experience using PECE and introducing PECE to new users. The GSR for the proposed work will be selected from this pool. The GSR will conduct design research to support development of digital architecture and workflows in PECE to support community-based research. The GSR will also train community members to use PECE, building from this to develop new, archived tutorials for community researchers and a guide for developing PECE-supported community-based research projects and archives. In later stages of the project, the GSR will share PECE with additional community-based research groups in California, helping them set up basic PECE workspace.
Cost-share supported Graduate Student Fellows (2): University of California-Irvine’s EcoGovLab Center has run a community-based research fellows program for 2.5 years, giving over 21 PhD students training and experience in community-based research and teaching. In the proposed work, two fellows (funded by EcoGovLab) will work 10 hours a week for 13 months of the project. They will actively work with our community partners in Santa Ana, helping identify issues and data that needs to be preserved, analyzed and acted on by the community. The fellows will build digital data content for Santa Ana community-based research projects, working collaboratively with the community members The EcoGovLab fellows will also be available to help build digital content for community-based research projects in California’s Yolo and Santa Cruz counties to get these projects off-the-ground.
Undergraduate Researchers (3) A key goal of the proposed work is to extend and diversify the PECE user community, drawing in and linking community based researchers and students. We will define meaningful roles and workflows for undergraduate students by hiring an undergraduate assistant at each of our California sites (UC Irvine, UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis). These students will learn to use PECE and the techniques of community-based research by working alongside our team and community partners.
Consultant Renato Vasconcellos Gomes [Chief Technologist, REVAX]The PECE Design Team has contracted with REVAX (a Florianopolis, Brazil-based software development firm) for more thanalmost five years for on-going PECE development and maintenance. REVAX specializes in Drupal-development and extensively customized a DRUPAL CMS to address the theoretical commitments and practical needs of collaborative ethnography and interpretive data analysis. In the proposed work, REVAX will develop the user interfaces, navigation tools, and security features needed in community-based research.