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That toxic places are bodily experienced and that by removing the body from those places we become disjointed ourselves and don’t understand it. This removal can be part of a protection mechanism.

The cover image of the Ergene River Basin is particularly effective for this essay in how it depicts the messiness of placeness. Without the caption, the viewer may recognize that this is an aerial image, or perhaps instead see it as a microscopy slide, as I first did. The bluriness and monochromicity of the image distorts scale in a manner not unlike that of toxics. 

I'd like to see more in the caption regarding how this image was created. Is it a found image? Did the contributor intentionally distort it? When was the image captured?

Project 3: Visualization of Collaboration and ControlTo Do: 

To integrate various forms of knowledge and knowledge production in our research processes, the first step should be rethinking the term ‘knowledge’ itself.How do we define knowledge? The so called ‘eurocentric-perspective’ of knowledge was defined for hundreds of years on the basis of christian belief systems, as well as colonial and capitalistic structures. As knowledge itself was defined by a system of power, the production of what was defined as knowledge could only happen within this system.

The server on which RDS sits costs $12.50 USD a month to maintain and run back-ups. I (Angela Okune) pay for this out of my personal funds. I also pay for the domain name on an annual basis ($15 USD). The initial technical set-up was done pro bono by Dr. Brian Callahan who also support any technical issues that might arise. Renato Vasconcellos Gomes is the key person supporting the RDS technical maintainance and troubleshooting of RDS and does this work for RDS pro bono/covered by other PECE platforms.

www.researchdatashare.org is hosted on Linode servers located in Frankfurt, Germany since at the time of installation, those were the closest Linode servers to Kenya and provided the greatest latency (fastest speed). Linode is a private American company based in Philadelphia.

On November 12, 2019, I and a team of volunteers and friends hosted an event entitled “Archiving Kenya’s Past and Futures” at McMillan Library, one of the oldest Kenyan libraries located in Nairobi’s Central Business District.

Much of my personal research materials are open and available to be re-used under CC licenses. There are a few completely private spaces (where I am the only person that has access to something). There are a few restricted spaces such as individual research organization’s org archives which are only viewable to those in the organization's group. We have an RDS group, which includes the Design Group members as well as several other researchers. In all cases, users need to register and either request access or be invited to the group.

All members of the group have the permissions needed to upload artifacts but this often seems overly laborious, especially since many of the artifacts are first shared on a WhatsApp channel before moving to RDS. Here, we have found PECE’s design has been both catalyzing and constraining. Since PECE does not allow bulk uploads, each artifact added must be justified with commentary. This means that every artifact has an interpretive supplement from the start but this can be challenging in a fast-paced research environment like Nairobi, where “time is money.”