JooYoung Seo Presentation

JooYoung Seo will give the talk, "Discovering Knowledge-Sharing Culture of Blind People Pursuing STEM Disciplines: Computational Ethnography Using Public Listserv Archives."

Abstract: STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) are known to be highly vision-dominant disciplines, and the majority of practices rely heavily on visual models. Although STEM literacy has become increasingly needed and important, those who are blind or visually impaired are unintentionally disenfranchised within this 21st-century ethos.

Several attempts have been made to address STEM accessibility issues for the blind. Yet existing studies have been limited primarily either to usability field testing or to special curriculum design, in the top-down approach taken by researchers. Little attention has been devoted to bottom-up research, where the lived experiences of blind STEM learners, as central storytellers, are portrayed naturally as yielding their own challenges and shared cultures.

JooYoung Seo, who is also a member of the blind community, will talk about how he has utilized computational ethnography to get voices of this underrepresented group heard in an unobtrusive fashion.

This talk will cover the following:

• Knowledge-sharing culture among members of the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) STEM mailing listservs;
• Emergent topics discussed among blind STEM community members;
• Specific technologies used by and for blind people in a STEM context, and
• Accessible data curation of study findings for blind people.
• At the end of this presentation, the audience will have two takeaways: (1) socio-technical aspects of STEM accessibility for the blind, and (2) methodological implications for computational ethnography across accessibility and reproducibility.

JooYoung Seo is a PhD candidate (ABD) in the Learning, Design, and Technology program at the Pennsylvania State University, an RStudio double-certified data science instructor (Tidyverse + Shiny), and internationally certified accessibility professional. His research topics involve accessible computing, universal design, inclusive data science, and equitable healthcare technologies. As a learning scientist and engineer who is blind, his research focuses particularly on how to make computational literacy accessible to learners with visual impairments using multi-modal data representation. As a result of his scholarly work, he has thus far published more than ten journal and conference papers in the field of learning sciences and technologies, seven papers in healthcare, and three peer-reviewed statistical-computing software packages. He has contributed to reproducible data science packages (e.g., shiny; rmarkdown; bookdown; distill) to be accessible to people with sensory (dis)abilities, and he interned at RStudio in summer 2020.

Meeting ID: 861 1597 8868
Password: 655317

Questions? Contact Lori Kelso