Professor Michelle Murphy's Data-Rescuing Hackathon featured in Wired

January 23, 2017 by Department of History Staff

In December of 2016, Michelle Murphy and Matt Price, two members of the Department of History, organized a "Guerilla Archiving" event to identify, preserve and archive data from the United States' Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that is under threat of being deleted or compromised by Donald Trump's government.

While the event was productive, some data sets were too tough for volunteers to crack, so Professor Murphy brought the remaining data to another hackathon at the University of Pennsylvania, which took place the day before Donald Trump's inauguration as President of the United States. The event, along with some thoughts from Professor Murphy, is profiled in a recent article in Wired. Read all about the librarians, archivists, technoscience scholars, researchers, coders, and climate scientists working alongside Professor Murphy to protect vulnerable data, including Barack Obama’s June 2013 Climate Action Plan and information about 2014 and 2015 methane-cutting strategies.

You can read all about the hackathon in Wired, and learn more about Professor Murphy's work on her website