Data Rescue workshop, Protecting Climate Data in Times of Political Turmoil, held at UCLA on Jan. 20.
Credit: Jennifer Pierre
On Inauguration Day, a group of students, researchers and librarians gathered in a nondescript building on the north side of the University of California, Los Angeles campus, against a backdrop of pelting rain.
The group had organized in protest against the new U.S. administration. But, instead of marching and chanting, participants were there to learn how to “harvest,” “seed,” “scrape” and ultimately archive websites and data sets related to climate change.
The need for such work quickly became palpable. Within hours of Trump’s inauguration ceremony, official statements on anthropogenic, or man-made, climate change vanished from governmental websites, including whitehouse.gov and that of the Environmental Protection Agency.
The UCLA event was one of several “data rescue” missions that have cropped up around the U.S., supervised by the Environmental Data Governance Initiative, an international network focused on threats to federal environmental and energy policy, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Program for Environmental Humanities.
These workshops […]
This is far more useful than marching around throwing fits & insults in the street. This effort addresses the surface level problem. The deeper problem is that governmeny has been using classifoed secrecy and F.O.I.A games for decades to keep the public in the dark on so many subjects. Patents, homeland insecurity profiles, political coverups, foreign policy strategies, etc. For example I believe the CIA just declassified their horrific plan hatched 30+ years ago to destabilize Syria. Hillary & Obama took care of that chore like good little puppets. We are forced to pay taxes (or face fines & jail time) to fund a government that gets more and more opaque. Time to defund.