 Hi everybody, my name is Jake Tompkins and I'm here to meet with you virtually from UCLA's Powell Library. And I'm going to talk to you a little bit about my background and some of my research interests. So I'm originally from Northeast Ohio. I'm from Hartville, Ohio. I went to Florida State University for undergrad and I studied actuarial science and double-minored in business and economics. While I was at Florida State, I attended a leadership workshop called Leadership. While I was there, I met the Associate Dean of Research and Learning with FSU's Libraries. His name was Michael Meth, and he recruited me for a research project that kind of jump-started me into librarianship. So for this project, I got to work really closely with our head assessment librarian, Kirsten Kinsley. Her and I worked really closely to investigate data from ARL statistics and Libqual to see if there was any sort of relationship between those two data sets. And then I received a scholarship from the Panhandle Library Access Network, and that kind of helped me go to the 2018 Library Assessment Conference where I got to present my research and meet information professionals from all over the United States. This is my first kind of professional conference. So it was really nerve-wracking, but also really exciting at the same time. And so at this time, I sort of realized that this was the kind of field that I wanted to go into. This is the kind of work that I love. And that's what kind of got me into grad school at UCLA. So when I thought about going to grad school, I talked to Mike about which programs I should apply to and what kind of schools I should look into. And Mike encouraged me to apply to UCLA because the MLIS program kind of has a focus on social justice and individual and community empowerment. And those were sort of attributes that stood out to me that I was really interested in. So thankfully, I got accepted to the MLIS program in 2019. I started in the fall and I decided to pursue the informatic specialization and I've kind of explored that avenue in different capacities while joining the UCLA IS community. Since being at UCLA, I felt a lot of pressure and sort of uncomfortable moments, especially being a first-generation college student and navigating this kind of academic space for the first time. I've learned to kind of think critically about the program itself and the department, and I've kind of challenged some of the things that we do in this program. So within my first quarter of the program, I took a data informatics class and in that class I did a project on the department's use of GRE scores and kind of explored how that sort of data gets used. I also developed this kind of gatekeeping tool to prevent students from low socioeconomic status from being able to apply to graduate school and it sort of prevents that, you know, diverse pool of applicants that are fully qualified to be able to join our field. I also felt that there was this missing link in the program between information studies and user experience research. So I collaborated with Dr. Leo Leveraux who is a latter faculty in my department and now my academic advisor and we partnered with a instructor at San Monica College who focuses on user experience design. And we kind of created this apprenticeship research course for IS students interested in UX for them to have an opportunity to get this foundational kind of user research and design information. I had served on the planning committee for the Los Angeles chapter of World Information Architecture Day in 2020 and this is when I met Lynn and she's actually an alumna from the MLIS program at UCLA and she taught as an adjunct in the department for about nearly a decade. However, when COVID hit my academic trajectory kind of changed a little. I was taking a research apprenticeship course right when COVID happened and this kind of inspired me to explore the subfield of crisis informatics. This field recognizes information and communication technology creates changes in the sociology of disasters, and we can kind of use this technology to analyze the situations and develop responses to them. I independently researched concepts like critical cartography, geographic information systems, computer supported collaborative work, and the theory of information as coined by Shoshana Zuboff. In March, I decided to apply for UCLA is IS digital resource initiative grant. I worked with a colleague of mine Julia Tainan mom, and we designed a digital exhibit called rebel archives in the Golden Gulag. This was a project that incorporated a bunch of primary resources about prison abolition. We included an oral history from the co founder of the California coalition for women prisoners, and also a bunch of documents of prison led struggles from the 1960s through the 80s. This project also incorporated a map that I built and tab low using geospatial data that was being collected by UCLA School of Law. I tracked the spread of COVID through jails and prisons in California and tried to exhibit you know the dangers of incarceration during a pandemic. In the rebel archives project I started participating in more GIS workshops and I actually joined in on the fourth annual humanitarian map of fun hosted collaboratively with UCLA and USC to traditionally as a competition between the two schools but we work collaboratively this year. We were using a tool called open street map to collaboratively work on projects that identify buildings on a map, and then community volunteers are able to go in and add additional data on those infrastructures to make information about them more accessible. Currently I'm working with Rick Dale and the Department of Communications. We are going to design a research project that will use our to scrape data from tweets about the bobcat fires going on in California and run statistical tests with natural language processing and some geospatial analysis.