Deluge Data, Data Deluge

• Virtual Sessions: October 19th, 26th and November 2nd, 2022
• In person symposium @ Tandon School of Engineering, NYU (Brooklyn Campus): November 4th, 2022
• Register for all sessions here

The FloodNet Consortium is pleased to host Deluge Data, Data Deluge, an online talk series and in-person symposium that brings critical perspectives from the humanities and arts into dialogue with engineering and data practitioners engaged in flood sensing. The online talks will be held over three weeks, culminating in an in-person day-long symposium held at New York University’s Brooklyn campus in fall of 2022.

Climate change in New York City means a future of flooding. With sea level rise and increasingly intense rainstorms, flooding is expected to have an outsized influence on public health, infrastructure, and mobility in urban areas. One response to this growing challenge is improving the city’s data collection capacities through the construction of a city wide flood sensor network, capable of providing real time, hyperlocal flood data. In this symposium we consider flooding as a signal of a rapidly changing environment to ask, what does it mean for flooding to become digitally sensed? We aim to explore the following questions:

• What does data do? What are the potentials and limitations of data-driven technologies and practices in climate change response, adaptation and resilience? How does the way it is produced, presented and shared shape how cities manage present day and coming environmental change?
• What role can data play to engage different publics with issues of flooding and climate emergency responsiveness? How are different publics already engaging with these technologies and data? How can data catalyze public engagement in new ways? How are data-driven technologies reshaping issues of equity and justice in flood response?
• How can we bring critical perspectives from the humanities and arts into dialogue with engineering and data practitioners? This event aims to catalyze a dialogue between theory and practice
• What are principles and pathways for building public engagement with flood data?

Sponsors

This event is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Department of Integrated Design and Media, New York University and the Advanced Science Research Center at the City University of New York.

Organizing Team

Tega Brain is an artist, researcher and environmental engineer. She investigates implications of emerging computational technologies on how the environment is understood and imagined. She is an Industry Associate Professor in the department of Technology, Culture and Society, NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Elizabeth Hénaff is a computational biologist and an artist investigating the way living beings interact with their environment, with a focus on the ubiquitous and invisible microbial component of our environment. She is an Assistant Professor in the department of Technology, Culture and Society, NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Kendra Krueger is an intersectional scientist, educator, artist and woman of color on many edges. She is the STEM Outreach and Education Manager at CUNY’s Advanced Science Research Center, where she has also founded The Community Sensor Lab as a space for DIY community science and advocacy.

Hannah Eisler Burnett is an anthropologist who studies water and the people who live and work alongside its shifting boundaries. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the FloodNet Project in the department of Technology, Culture and Society, NYU Tandon School of Engineering.