BuzzFeed Open Lab

10/31/2017

The Open Lab closed out our second year with a hand drawn zine. ✍️?✏️

This year, the second and last of the Open Lab fellowship program, has been a fantastic and inspiring exploration of participation, voices, and conversation. I love the thought provoking ways that each fellowship project…

10/30/2017

This year as an Open Lab fellow experimenting in wearable embedded cameras one thing became apparent during my research. There is a ton of documentation - good, bad and horrible.

There is so much assumed knowledge in the technological documentation that exist. Good instructionals does not only…

10/30/2017

This year at the Open Lab I set out to create a DIY civic tool to encourage citizen newsgathering. To accomplish this I, admittedly, tried to solve a few too problems at once. I wanted to figure out how to repurpose old mobile devices and expired electronics to cut down on e-waste. I didn’t just…

10/29/2017

For the past 8 months, I’ve studied the alt-right. Francis Tseng and I built a Chrome extension to highlight words that have special meaning in their online forums. .

Since last November, I have been studying the alt-right as a part of my Open Lab Eyebeam fellowship. My methodology when studying…

10/27/2017

Salvaging usable parts from older electronics is a good way to save money and keep electronics out of the landfill, at least for a little while. Before you toss your old electronic items and their parts in the trash, look at them with a critical eye. Determine if any of the interior parts can be…

10/20/2017

Our lives online are no longer just mere extensions of the happenings in our lives in the ‘real world.’ We make connections online — good ones and bad — and have experiences online that feel real and formative. We build our world views based on information we are exposed to online. Our Umwelt has…

10/17/2017

As part of a larger body of research on online hate speech, and the alt-right, my collaborator Francis Tseng and I wanted to analyze the overlap between two subreddits: r/The_Donald and the (now banned) r/altright.

With the President’s slow response to condemning neo-Nazis, his general comments…

10/05/2017

My collaborator and I trained a neural net on images I’ve taken of my family for the past 13 years since Hurricane Katrina. Can you teach an algorithm emotions and poetry? We explored

Can machines understand emotion?

a page from the book of poetry Ross and I created- it's an image of my…

08/01/2017

07/06/2017

If you missed it, definitely check it out.

06/22/2017

Automatic license plate readers, protest kettling technologies, location tracking devices, biometric databases and behavior prediction tools are only the beginning of new technologies that law enforcement agencies are using to track communities. These tools can build narratives about people,…

05/26/2017

Your cell phone is designed to scan for available cell towers and check in with them at regular intervals. But there’s no mechanism in place in most phones to distinguish a legitimate cell tower from a fake one. "IMSI catchers," also known in the United States by the brand name "Stingray," are…