dr. meg smith

Indeed! Part of our conversation is about disambiguating the various technologies that fall under the guise of AI.

I agree! It’s so easy to forget that we can be complicit in AI’s harms even if we don’t use it.

9 (contd). SIUE isn’t well-connected to town, and the town isn’t well-connected to the region. (Both are deliberate.) That has material impacts on students, but they don’t feel like they have any recourse. One goal of this assignment is to empower them to make change, here and wherever they end up.

Lab 11: Spatial Analysis and Spatial Justice (3/26) MARCH 26, 2025 Spatial analysis is a method that uses mapping and geographic information systems (GIS) to analyze the relationships between people, places, and resources. Those relationships dictate what kind of access people have to things like grocery stores, banks, employment opportunities, green spaces, and more. Spatial analysis is a great tool for exploring concepts of spatial justice. In this lab, we'll explore the spatial relationship between SIUE and the town of Edwardsville. There are lots of tools we can use for spatial analysis. The most common one is ArcGIS, which is a proprietary (that is a paid) platform. We'll be using a free tool. Those are sometimes less versatile (although you can do an awful lot with them!), but they also allow us to keep our data and our analysis regardless of whether we have access to a particular platform, and they're often easier to use because they're not as complex.

Understanding the Lay of the Land 1. Go to https://mymaps.google.com and sign in. Hit the Create a New Map button. 2. Navigate to Edwardsville. Using the push pin button, drop a pin onto the university and label it. 3. Use the search bar to search for a particular kind of amenity - for instance, restaurants, grocery stores, or parks. 4. Use the + button to add the results to your map. 5. Make some observations: what does the distribution of those pins look like? Where are they clustered? Are they in proximity to the university? Are they distributed evenly throughout the area? Are they all grouped in one spot? 6. Make sure you share your map with all group members before the end of class!

Thinking About Access 1. Pick the closest pin to the university and grab its name or coordinates. Head over to Google Maps (the regular kind) and get the directions from the university to that place. 2. Look at a few modes of transportation. How long would it take to drive there? Bike there? Take public transit there? 3. What would it cost to get there? Think about gas, parking, transit fares, exertion, and other costs that might crop up. 4. Now go back to your original map and look through the pins you added. Which one would you most like to go to? That is, which one would best serve your needs? 5. Do the same thing for that location, mapping out directions and analyzing costs.

Reflecting on Resources 1. What are the implications of your analysis? Is this an example of good access to resources, or are there challenges here? Is this an issue of spatial injustice? 2. Reflect a little on your spatial analysis lab. What observations did you make? Have the things you noticed impacted how you experience SIUE and/or Edwardsville? How do you think they might impact others' experiences, whether they're students, faculty/staff, or community members? What do you think has caused the patterns you identified? If there's an element of spatial injustice in what you observed, how might it be addressed?

9. This one’s part of my broader project of developing students’ tech ethics. We use readily available tools to analyze access to resources in the local area. My goal is to equip students to 1) recognize injustice in their communities, 2) analyze its sources, and 3) advocate for effective change.

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8. We work with historical data too. Alongside readings about why the census is flawed, they try their hand at encoding and visualizing census data with Palladio. They learn historical & archival skills, as well as why digitization & OCR are not panaceas and how flawed data produces flawed analysis.

7 (contd). This could be a lengthier assignment, and I do also assign a data review essay. But the low-stakes group work of the short-form lab is valuable:
• I can see how they search for things
• They teach each other what to look for
• Talking through things results in more intentional writing

Lab 14: Follow the Data (4/16) APRIL 16, 2025 On Monday, we talked about three aspects of civic technology that help to make the government more accessible and effective for its constituents: govtech (how the government makes itself available), public data (providing access to data that impacts constituents), and participatory democracy (grassroots efforts to render government more effective). Today we're going to hone in on public data. Public data offers the means to hold governments accountable, to understand how data informs decision-making, and to examine and sometimes contest the ways data is collected. It also informs reporting - every day, we see headlines that utilize data to make an (often inflammatory or click-baity) argument. Being able to track down the source of that data allows us to engage critically and thoughtfully with the news as well as with the government.

For today's lab, we're digging into some data-driven headlines about the St. Louis metro. Working in groups, explore your assigned article and work through the prompts in this form. You'll be looking for 1) the argument the article is making, 2) how the reporter is using data to support that argument, 3) the source of that data, and 4) some thoughts about whether or not the article makes good and accurate use of that data. NB: You might have to dig a bit to find the source of the data! Some articles might not link to it at all, and others might link to aggregators. Do your best to figure out the earliest origin of that data. (E.g. if the article links to an aggregator of crime statistics, try to figure out who actually collected them — local police departments? the FBI? a private company?)

Articles: • STL ranks #1 for fatal hit-and-runs: Poll • A shortage of luxury homes is keeping St. Louis hot • Housing markets facing greater risk of decline concentrated in California, New Jersey, Illinois, and Florida • Madison County School District 12 ranked least equitable district in Illinois • Agricultural hub: St. Louis ports handle 50% of U.S. crop movement

7. Here’s another one that empowers students to be more critical consumers of news. They work in groups to investigate and analyze the data sources of supposedly data-driven reporting. This is especially important in the STL region, which is victim to all kinds of problematic stats regarding crime.

GitHub - msmith0913/teachingwithmaps Contribute to msmith0913/teachingwithmaps development by creating an account on GitHub.

6. These big intangibles are harder to approach directly in my 200-level, but I build up to them through hands-on exercises that explore where our data comes from, what we do to it, and what kinds of questions we can reasonably ask of it. I’ve written about and created a template for one of them.

5. Later in the semester, when we talk about data practices and critical data studies, we’ll read Arthur C. Clarke’s “Nine Billion Names of God,” revisiting some of those same questions about epistemology and meaning-making in big data.

4 (contd). We’ll explore the desire for universal knowledge and how it connects to information access, privacy, epistemology, and labor.

4. My new course this fall (a 400/500) integrates a lot of history of information technology alongside sci fi short stories. As we dig into AI early in the semester, we’ll put it in conversation with the Library of Alexandria (both myth and reality) and with Borges’ “The Library of Babel.”

3 (contd). The goal isn’t to make them adopt my own AI ethics, which precludes any use of AI. I want them to learn how to assess new technologies in keeping with their own values. Will they still use AI? Probably. But if they start to experience that cognitive friction when they do, that’s a win.

3 (contd). I ask them to decide: which tasks are worth the cost? They usually say cancer detection and deep space exploration are worthwhile. Writing an email isn’t. We talk about the different tech behind those tasks too - how can we disambiguate in articles that hype up an “AI-powered” tool?

3. But my primary approach to AI usage is to equip students to develop their own AI ethics. We read articles about the ethical harms: to the environment, to groups harmed by algorithmic bias, to our knowledge infrastructures, to our labor practices. We read about what it does well, too.

2 (contd). I do call it out when I see it, and I give students the opportunity to redo their work. I do a lot of process-based assignments and labs that make it fairly evident when a student has used AI.

Black teenagers twice as likely to be falsely accused of using AI tools in homework Racial biases are creeping into teachers’ policing of generative AI tools among students, the study found.

2. But I don’t hunt it down to penalize it either. The AI detection tools don’t work, and it becomes a vehicle for faculty’s own biases and assumptions about which students are capable of excellence. A report last year found Black students are twice as likely to be falsely accused of AI usage.

My AI syllabus statement: AI The use of artificial intelligence tools (especially generative Al like ChatGPT for text or Stable Diffusion for images, or Github Copilot for code) is ethically complicated and in many cases falls under the plagiarism policy. My goal for you in this course is that you develop your own tech ethics, including Al. Here are a few starting points for us: • I will not require you to use Al, even to test or challenge its capabilities. • You may not use generative Al for day-to-day assignments, where you're meant to experiment with technologies, build things, break things, and reflect on the process. Those are all activities that can only be productive if you do them yourself from start to finish. • You may choose to use such tools for your final project, if you discuss it with me in advance. I'll want to see that you understand both the benefits and the drawbacks of the tool you choose, as well as that you're engaging with it critically in process and product. • Editing tools like Grammarly are permitted for your regular writing assignments, but please know that I'm not assessing those for grammar and spelling (so long as I can understand the point you're making). Instead, I'm looking for thoughtful engagement with your experience of the tool or website and with the themes and questions we're addressing in class.

1. I do not use AI myself on ethical grounds, and one of my commitments is that I will never require students to use it — not even to critique it. I talk about this on day 1, and students often express some relief at that. They are TIRED of the “ask ChatGPT to see well or badly it does” assignments.

Hey historians and digital humanists, in light of the AHA’s AIgate, here are a few ways I approach AI in the classroom. Feel free to add your own! These are in the context of digital humanities courses deeply rooted in history, literature, and tech/data ethics.
#DigitalHumanities #AHA #Skystorians 🗃️

France and Germany unveil Docs, a homegrown alternative to Google Docs The Trump administration has set out to drastically reshape the relationship between the US and Europe. In response, Brussels is scrambling to adapt to this new reality,...

The EU is headed this way with its new open source alternative to Google Docs.

www.techspot.com/news/107225-...

This is the AHA’s single acknowledgement and simultaneous dismissal of the ethical concerns with generative AI: If you choose to ban AI in the classroom on ethical grounds, you are failing to adequately prepare your students.

I’m sorry that you have so little faith in yourselves and your students.

A picture of a brown vintage footstool being held by one leg as I stand in line for train boarding

This week on Amtrak, I have 1) had an impromptu mapping meeting with someone who happened to be on the same train and 2) transported a piece of furniture. Car-free living at its finest!

The only acceptable AI tell

A screenshot from an email. It reads: "Hey Meg, This is ready for you to break:"

Just a day in the life of a digital humanities center
#DigitalHumanities #DHBreaks

Psst, hey SIUE faculty friends…

We're super excited in IRIS to get to keep supporting this project!

Yeah, it definitely has to be a suggested donation through the foundation rather than an actual fee for service. That’s a good point about setting expectations. I think I’ll wind up doing both: a workshop for those who want to learn, and a donation-based service for those who don’t.

For sure! At the very least, I’ll do some simple instructions. I’m also considering offering to just do it for people in exchange for a suggested donation to the center 💰😂💰

A quilted pouch featuring a Japanese flower motif and a navy and white floral binding

The quilted pouch open to reveal a variety of sewing notions in various vinyl and cotton pockets

It’s regalia pocket time! I’m adding pockets to mine this week, and if all goes well, we’ll do an informal workshop next week, in time for convocation. #DHMakes #ThanksItHasPockets

Ooh, this is a great idea!

Thanks! They were fun to sew, too!