 Thank you for being patient, little technical difficulties. Also, I'm insanely nervous. This is my first talk, so. I'm so excited. My name is Camila Jenkins at Camila J. If you want to follow me on Twitter, no pressure. I'm originally from Cleveland, Ohio. I graduated with a BA in psychology, and I found my home in Seattle. And there, I became engrossed in my passion for coding. I attended multiple meetups there and found a way to use code to automate tasks as a researcher. And shortly after, I found Ada Developers Academy, which is an all-omens software training program in downtown Seattle. And now, I'm currently an intern at Iceland, which is an EMC-squared company. We do big data storage. And there, I'm learning Python and quickly falling in love with JavaScript. Visualizing disparity. What is disparity? To me, disparity is greater than the quality or state of being different. If you look in a dictionary, that's what it will tell you. But I believe that the story is incomplete, and it's also casual at best. It lacks the key components that directly impact the individuals experiencing it. And to me, it lacks the interpersonal connection and weight that the word disparity carries. When we proceed disparity with words like socioeconomic, physical, and racial, we link the symptoms to the overall cause. The World Health Organization defines social determinants as the circumstances into which people are born, live, work, and age, and the systems put in place to deal with them. The circumstances are then, in turn, shaped by a wider set of forces, economics, social polities, and politics. In my opinion, this definition applies to all forms of disparity. For example, stating that in 2010, the US Census listed Owensley County as having the lowest medium household income in the country. With 41.5% of residents living below the poverty line, you are doing more than stating a difference. Ideally, you're acting as an agent of awareness. So why visualizingdysparity.com? Well, growing up, I constantly heard people say that by traveling to Finland of blank country, I learned so much about poverty, injustice, inequality, and et cetera. And because they traveled to those places, they became more grateful, more sympathetic, more empathetic, and well-rounded individuals. This is really fantastic and great. But as a teenager filled with a lot of angst, I had a really different idea. What if we could see all of the lives of the underrepresented and underserved, very deserving, underserved in our backyards? How could they starkly contrast the American dream? And would the personal impact be greater? My goal is to create a dashboard displaying multiple disparities, like high school graduation rates and infant mortality, with totals separated by race and economic class. Using multiple visualization techniques, I will engage users while providing impactful data. So let's take a look. Here is my project. So if you notice, when you click on a state, you zoom in to the city level. And on the right-hand side, there is an information pane with data. Yeah. So in my project, I'm using a highly customizable JavaScript library called D3. And what's so great about D3 is not only beautiful, but really, really powerful. And once you regroup after hyperventilating about seeing math and JavaScript code as a beginner, you really find well-written and heavily documented library with many code examples to help get you started. So as you notice, when you hover over this state, the data is displayed in an information pane. And also, another great thing about D3, the creators and contributors are always on hand for questions that you have. And this data is stored in my ProSgress database. And it's hosted at my chosen URL, which is really long. But what's so great about AWS, where my site is hosted, is that it allows me to instantly send my code from my terminal into a cloud server in a very comfortable way. And AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. And it allows you to link your domain name to your project. And you can see the actual progress happen as you're working on any machine. I would say a challenging aspect of the project was finding reliable up-to-date data. And by up-to-date, I mean no earlier than 2010, and reliable meaning consistent across all 50 states. And it was also challenging to then dissect the data onto multiple races, and then send it to the database in the format that was needed so that it can be easily rendered in the browser. Also, another challenge was the fancy term that I'm sure you're all familiar with called the imposter syndrome. Yeah, that's really real. And as a beginner, when I created this project, I was coding for about a total of five months. So imposter syndrome hit really hard. And speaking from the perspective of a woman of color and tech, imposter syndrome is really confounded with external forces that I mentioned earlier, as well as life circumstances and home life experiences from school prior to your current state, and also microaggressions and racism, coupled with your perceived ability. So the list can be endless. And now that you've heard about the current state of my project, I would talk about what I would do in the future. Currently, I have state-level data for only one issue, however, and for one race. But in the future, I want multiple issues aggregated on multiple races, ethnic backgrounds, physical abilities, and economic classes. And then users will be able to parse the data rendered by an API by using multiple filters. And for example, if you want to see high school graduation rates for black middle-class individuals in Ohio or maybe for a different issue in a different race, in the future, you will be able to do so. And this information will also be provided using a D3 chart or graph. And right now, the information is statewide. And soon, there will be county-level data. And for example, if you want to see that in Owensley County, the 41.5% of residents who live below poverty line, you'll be able to do so. And further in, there will be city data, like in Rochester, New York, the infant mortality rate is double the national figure with 12 deaths at 1,000 live births. And this was reported by NPR in 2014. And after city data, there will be district and neighborhood data. So you will be able to see, for example, that in the San Francisco Bay area, in a town in San Ramon, only 2.6% of adult residents did not finish high school. But 63.3% of Vernon Central area Los Angeles students did not finish high school. And this was reported by routers in 2011. So now that I've talked about what I want to do in the future, why in the world did I choose this career path? After graduating in psychology and working as a research assistant, well, software engineering is one of the few careers that allows me to combine my creativity, my social precarity, and investigative nature into one career. There is always so much to learn. You can never learn enough. And there are avenues for me to express social causes. And this also makes it near impossible to run low on creative, independent project ideas. And if time was renewable and eternal, then I could, I don't know, I could do so much more. Also, I have a plethora of tools literally at my fingertips. And that really feels powerful. And also, in my opinion, tech gives me the autonomy that I need. Unlike being a research assistant, I do not need to fill out grant papers and hassle for money. If it's free and I can do it on my computer, I can make it happen. Thank you.