Bio
Sara J. Grossman is a poet and Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies on the Johanna Alderfer Harris and William H. Harris, M.D Professorship in Environmental Studies at Bryn Mawr College. Her poems and essays have been published in Verse Daily, Michigan Quarterly Review, American Literature, Environmental Humanities, Disability Studies Quarterly and elsewhere. Her first book of poems was published by New Issues Poetry & Prose in October 2018. She has received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, National Endowment for the Humanities, The MacDowell Colony, and Hedgebrook.
Data Care in Interglacial Times
In 2018, Amazon Web Services became one of several hosting parties for government-captured, U.S. meteorological and climatological data. In partnership with Amazon, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released historic and contemporary data, previously held on videotape, to computing publics as part of their Big Data Project. But there are significant risks to storing vital weather and climate data with profit-based cloud companies. The first portion of this talk asks how histories of U.S. environmental data capture and calculation have not only brought us into this contemporary data landscape, but also how a more just data future might be imagined. What would alternative data archives look like, ones stewarded and cared for by the communities who need them most? The second portion of the talk investigates several experimental models for community-based, environmental data collection and archiving conducted by environmental humanities students, faculty, and community partners at Bryn Mawr College.