As the year comes to a close, I am sure all of us have had moments of growth and learning that we can bring to the new year.  

Throughout this semester, I was wondering what my final project should be about. As I was wandering about my native city of New York, and in the Bronx, I looked around and saw a garden right next to where I live. I asked the question? Do my fellow neighbors frequent this place? I barely did it myself. The Digital humanist in me quickly wondered if I could find a list of community gardens in the entirety of the Bronx and to my excitement, I was able to quickly find two types of data visualizations. First I was able to find a City funded program called Greenthumb in where they, with volunteers, maintain and keep these gardens functional as well as have a beautiful Geospatial map visualization of all the gardens in NYC. A Screenshot is below:  

The second item I found was an opendata Excel sheet with all the metadata of these gardens.  

It included name, borough, address and even community district.  

https://data.cityofnewyork.us/dataset/GreenThumb-Garden-Info/p78i-pat6/data

With these data points I thought of a question for a project and what came to mind was if I was able to create a project in where I can collect data on how much edible surplus is available to choose from. I couldn’t find anything of the sort online and I decided this was a fun thought experiment to work with!  

As I started working on my project, many of our readings came to mind but what really struck me was the seven principles of data feminism. “Consider context. Data feminism asserts that data are not neutral or objective. They are the products of unequal social relations, and this context is essential for conducting accurate, ethical analysis.” (2020)  

 In the case of my project, I also try to see the context behind data and try not to see as “food being stolen” but as what can we do with any surplus of vegetable. If this project were to be funded, I would say this can help bring community awareness to items that already exist using data.  

Really amazed by everyone’s projects and how everyone, including Professor Gold was so accommodating to our needs. Looking forward to next semester! Enjoy your holidays everyone!