Projects

The projects below are all currently active. Older projects are described in my CV and can generally be found in one of my Github accounts (cf. Web Presence).

Code At the Edge

Inspired by the Himalayan Borderlands project (see below), Code At the Edge aims to turn web developer skills into a tool for social justice and equity, by teaching those skills to girls from “backward castes” in a remote area that is on the brink of connection to high-speed Internet. We develop curriculum, software, and hardware packages for deployment in remote areas with intermittent electricity and network connections. The project has been largely suspended during COVID but I hope to return to it in 2021-22.

Himalayan Borderlands

I am a participant in Himalayan Borderlands, a five-year project (2017-2022) on mountain cultures and travel histories in the Eastern Himalaya. It aims to explore religious expression in written and oral depictions of Himalayan travel. In this project, we are exploring how mountain spaces are constructed by inflections of power and transnational forces, how religious practices interact with the environment, and how stories embedded in local landscapes shape a traveler’s experience. We hope that our work may contribute to histories of Himalayan travel by local and international communities.

Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI)

I am proud to have worked intensively with EDGI from its founding in late 2016 through the early part of 2020. Our work archiving environmental data and calling attention to the falsification of government websites has had real impact. The development of a a concept of envrironmental data justice has had significant ramifications, e.g. in Michelle Murpy’s Environmental Data Justice Lab. Our work has been covered extensively in the press.

S. O. Shreds

A dashboard for weather conditions at various points in Southern Ontario, geared towards whitewater paddlers and lake surfers. The site also offers a journal functionality, allowing journal entries to be correlated with gauge and buoy data. While this site is aimed at hobbyists, it’s been an interesting exploration of API’s available to citizen scientists, and I would be interested to expand the kinds of data I access. It’s possible that more generally significant findings could be pulled out of the multi-factor water gauges which are now installed by many river conservation authorities. Writing the code also give me a chance to start learning about React and Redux, as well as exploring various graphics libraries. The code is available on Github.

Org-LMS

This somewhat chaotic project started as a proof-of-concept effort to write an API client in emacs-lisp, and has evolved to become my principal method for interacting with the Canvas LMS software that runs the University of Toronto’s course management system, quercus. This system allows me to manage all my course content in plain-text Org-Mode files, and to mark papers on my laptop, with its extensive keystroke customizations, where I feel more comfortable than I do in a web portal. The Canvas API is extremely well-documented and has been very helpful. I’d like to get this to a plac ewhere it can be integrated with scimax as part of a broader set of tools for academic Emacs users.