CODING CLIMATE INEQUALITY
My dissertation research, entitled, Coding Climate Inequality: An Ethnography of Data Control, Efficiency, and Environmental Justice in Postcolonial Indonesia, explores how recent computational practices in environmental knowledge production transform scientific authority and postcolonial state legitimacy in capital city Jakarta, Indonesia. Based on 18 months of field research, I describe how subterranean peatland protection is put forward as a national priority in Indonesia, justifying the implementation of various computational tools and bureaucratic reforms with varying ecological and social consequences. This includes the use of data science for peatland fire prediction that do little to stem fires driven by industrial palm oil expansion and the introduction of agile theory in governance to engineer a productive and efficient science bureaucracy. In conversation with geospatial analysts, computer engineers, and other experts in Indonesia, Singapore, and the United States, I examine how software cultures and algorithms are implicated in new regimes of perception and verification, labor and governance, amidst the ongoing deregulation of public science institutions in Indonesia.
Selected Outputs:
Lin, Cindy and Silvia Lindtner. “Techniques of Use: Confronting value systems of productivity, progress, and usefulness in computing and design.” In Proceedings of the ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference (CHI '21).
Lin, Cindy. How Forest Became Data: The Remaking of Ground Truth. The Nature of Data: Infrastructures, Environments, Politics, Ed. Jenny E. Goldstein and Eric Nost, University of Nebraska Press. Forthcoming 2021.
Lin, Cindy. “How to Make a Forest.” e-flux architecture, April 2020.
Lin, Cindy Kaiying. Algorithmic Vision to Notice Differently. In Proceedings of DIS ’19 (DIS ’19). ACM, New York, NY, USA.
