Anti-Racism, Pro-Astronomy: Week 2

For background on what this is all about, check out my first post on Anti-Racism, Pro-Astronomy.

This week, I've gotten the ball rolling on the Diversity Journal Club (DJC) blog idea, which I'm calling astroDJC. Before committing to a name, I briefly considered renaming Diversity Journal Club to a new name with less contention like "inclusion" or "equity" rather than "diversity". After a brief Twitter discussion about alternatives, I decided to stick with Diversity simply because many institutions have DJCs by that name, and its goals and purpose is widely recognized. If you have strong opinions about the name and what alternatives you'd prefer, I'd love to hear them on Twitter or in the comments.

astroDJC

The first iteration of the blog is now live(!) with two posts contributed by Nell Byler (with Russell Deitrick) about the Genius Effect and the Matilda Effect. I encourage you to read these posts, first for content and then for format, and give feedback about how these posts work as a template for future submissions.

Submitting a post to astroDJC

I created a GitHub repository for suggested posts for astroDJC where anyone can contribute their resources and discussion questions for DJC presentations. For those unfamiliar with GitHub, there is a wiki page (still in development) with a tutorial on how to contribute a post to astroDJC on GitHub in the browser, without any command line nonsense.

The workflow goes something like this:

1. A contributor will take a template post file styled with markdown, and fill it with content. 
2. Once they are happy with their draft post, they can submit it to astroDJC for review via a pull request, where we can collaborate on improvements and make corrections. 
3. The finalized file will be merged to the repository where it will be stored, converted into HTML with pandoc, and posted to the astroDJC blog.

Why GitHub?

Using GitHub for contributed posts ensures a few things that are important to me:

• The ability to post must be open to everyone. Pull requests can be submitted by anyone, removing the need for a moderator or gatekeeper – which has been a sticking point in some social media circles lately... This way, if an undergraduate or physics graduate student wants to contribute but wouldn't have the credentials to prove that they're an astronomer (though they may be an expert on DJC issues), the content of their post is all that will matter to be considered for a submission.
• The collaborative dialogue on each post – from the moment it's submitted via pull request to the moment it's merged – is done in public, where those who are interested can contribute and those aren't can ignore it. GitHub's notifications settings are flexible and easy to use, allowing you to get as much or as little notification about each pending update as you like.
• Appropriate attribution is natural – you choose how you'd like to be referred to in the final blog post, and the history of your contribution is logged in GitHub for bragging rights/reference.
• Writing posts in markdown enables contributors to have some control over the formatting of the post without prior knowledge of HTML (though of course, this is in exchange for prior knowledge of markdown, but I think this is a preferable exchange).

If you would like to submit a post and have any difficulty, reach out to me and I'll help you and work to update the tutorial to make it more complete and intuitive.

Make a submission and gimme feedback!

I'd really like to hear what you think about the blog, the post template, and the example posts that are up. The best way to get good feedback would be to have you give it a test drive – if you've given a DJC talk, try putting it into astroDJC format and submit a pull request. Then be sure to make suggestions about how can we make this tool more effective and easy to use.

Anti-Racism, Pro-Astronomy: Week 1

What's this about?

I'm participating in a six month Anti-Racism, Pro-Astronomy experiment led by Sarah Tuttle to educate myself on matters of diversity in STEM each week, and act on that education. For the two weeks leading up to the start date, I tried to convince myself that my first idea for an action plan would be hard, but I've decided it's worth a shot. Before I tell you my plan, some background.

At the UW, graduate students and faculty involved in our Pre-MAP program hold meetings called Diversity Journal Club. It's like an astro-ph journal club for matters of diversity in STEM, though the requirements to present recent papers are relaxed. One or two speakers laboriously hunt through social science literature and pop-sci articles looking for sources to cite and to build presentations around. They prepare a presentation, and end on discussion questions for the audience, often leaving room for people to discuss personal experiences or how to take positive action. In my time at UW, the present Diversity Journal Club owes its organization and sources of topics to a big group of people including Sarah Garner, Russell Deitrick, Nell Byler, Eddie Schwieterman, Michael Tremmel, Erin Hicks, and Christine Edgar, among others.

I have gained much more actionable knowledge at these Diversity Journal Clubs (DJCs) than I ever have from an astro-ph journal club, and I think they hold an important place in the discussion about how to combat racism in astronomy. DJCs give us a common vocabulary that may help to ease the flow of conversation in our office or at home about race, which is so often talked about as a "hot-button issue" that we need to actively remind each other that it's a personal matter for nearly half of the members of our community. DJCs create a venue for unaware perpetrators of microaggressions to (potentially) recognize their actions. DJCs confront scientists in their own language and challenge them to draw on statistically quantified results from that tell us what we're doing right or wrong.

I think we could all use more of that kind of active introspection.

What's the plan?

I've always been a tremendous fan of astrobites for summarizing nearly impenetrable journal articles, making it possible for undergraduates to find accessible introductions to the papers they are nearly ready to read. As an undergraduate, I found that astrobites articles met me half-way in my half-English half-astronomer language which gave me enough context and background to then read the full journal article without stopping to Google.

I want to start a blog in the spirit of astrobites dedicated to finding primary sources that can act as the seeds of Diversity Journal Club discussions. These can include peer-reviewed journal articles or primary-source personal accounts by under-represented minorities in any field which speakers feel can help teach majority astronomers about the experience of the non-majority. Each post will also include a brief description of the paper and its results or major take-aways, and a handful of questions that speakers can use to start discussions after their presentation. My primary goal is to lower the barrier of entry so that interested astronomers at other institutions have no excuse not to host a Diversity Journal Club with borrowed momentum. 

Need a source that describes a Hawaiian perspective on TMT? We'll have that. Need some pointed questions to get your colleagues challenging their views on the issue? We'll work on those. 

At first, I will source these posts from the Diversity Journal Club presentations that have already happened at UW by collecting sources from my peers. I also want to collect information on how they found their sources and collect those resources in one place. The posts will not be presentations in a box, but they will point you in a few directions to base a presentation on. 

This week I've done a bit of research on options for multi-author blogging and on how Diversity Journal Club runs here. Next week, I plan to tap every past DJC speaker I can find to chat about their resources and how they come upon them, and take input from peers and other Anti-Racism, Pro-Astronomy participants on how best to do this blog.

If you have good resources or (even know of another blog that does this and makes my idea unnecessary), let me know in the comments or on Twitter.