Biography

Catherine D'Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer and hacker mama who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy and civic engagement. She has run women's health hackathons, designed global news recommendation systems, and led walking data visualizations to envision the future of sea level rise. Her forthcoming book from MIT Press (2020), Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. With Rahul Bhargava, she built the platform Databasic.io, a suite of tools and activities to introduce newcomers to data science. Her research at the intersection of technology, design & social change has been published in the Journal of Peer Production, the Journal of Community Informatics, and the proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI). She has collaborated with the City of Boston on a program called Civic Data Ambassadors that trained public librarians to be ambassadors for open data. D'Ignazio is an assistant professor in the Journalism Department at Emerson College, a Senior Fellow at the Emerson Engagement Lab and a research affiliate at the MIT Center for Civic Media & MIT Media Lab.