Data Rescue Event a Massive Success

Anthropology in NYC, Anthropology in the Field, Faculty Research, Graduate Students, Undergraduate Students

On Saturday, February 4th, 2017, several students from the Department led by Professor Jerome Whitington, participated in a Data Rescue event designed to archive and protect several websites on climate change, environmental data, and energy usage that could be threatened by our current Trump administration. Below is a statement from Professor Whitington detailing the success of the event:

“[The event] went off extremely well – about 160 people were involved, we archived a lot of federal websites and data especially from the Dept of Energy and Dept of Interior, and some other important work as well.It’s pretty heartening to see so many people engaged with environmental information and regulatory systems to such a degree of detail. Notably, we hosted a meeting among some key librarians around the country. It seems university librarians have been discussing a plan to systematically archive government data for about two decades, and some work has been done but there has never been a push to actually get it running. Due to the popular demand for this, there is now a movement for big libraries to create trusted data reserves linked in with their indexing systems. If this comes online it will be a very big win for us.”

The event was also covered extensively in the press. You can read articles about it here, here, here, and here.

Anthropologists Uncover 38,000 Year-Old Engravings

Anthropology in the Field, Center for the Study of Human Origins, Faculty Research

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“An international team of anthropologists has uncovered a 38,000-year-old engraved image in a southwestern French rockshelter—a finding that marks some of the earliest known graphic imagery found in Western Eurasia.” Professor Randall White, of the NYU Department of Anthropology and the Center for the Study of Human Origins, contributed to the findings. You can read more about the discoveries, here.

Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp on Disability and the Election

Anthropology in the Field, Faculty Research
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#cripthevote T-shirt. Photo courtesy of the Disability Visiblity Project.

Professor Faye Ginsburg and Professor Rayna Rapp contributed to the online HotSpots section of the journal Cultural Anthropology, commenting on the interplay of disability and politics in the 2016 US Presidential Election. The piece can be read in full here and provides an illuminating examination of the ways disability has been talked about and represented during this unprecedented election season.

Congratulations to Faye and Rayna!