Digital Accessibility for All
Gauri Jain

This project investigates prevalent accessibility issues across a range of websites by employing both automated tools—such as Lighthouse, Axe, and Wave—and thorough manual testing using screen readers. It examines 11 diverse websites spanning categories like e-commerce, social media, universities, and banking to identify common barriers, including missing captions, improper ARIA roles, insufficient text contrast, and inadequate form element accessibility. The study highlights how these issues impact navigation and overall user experience for individuals with disabilities. By incorporating essential time-saving features such as precise ARIA roles, clear labeling, and comprehensive multimedia captions, the project demonstrates ways to not only comply with WCAG guidelines but also significantly boost website usability and navigation speed. 

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Sankofa Sky Farm
Sheyna Burns

Sankofa Sky Farm (SSF) is a student-led vertical farming research project at UCSC that aims to revolutionize sustainable agriculture. This project was founded by current UCSC Agroecology student, Sheyna Burns. When asked about what inspired her to start SSF, Burns states, “The driving force behind Sankofa Sky Farm was a basic need: access. This need centers on ensuring everyone can get healthy, nutrient-packed produce regardless of where they live or how much money they have—it’s a basic human right.”

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Exploring New Methods for Social Media Research
Aidan Meek

This project aimed to investigate if it would be relevant and feasible to conduct social media research to gain insight into housing desirability and sense of place in wildland urban interfaces in Santa Cruz County, and if so, what kind of methodology would be best. Through a review of literature and various methodological attempts, the lack of results as well as the structure of the digital landscape suggest other avenues of research could be more fruitful. Tangentially, one methodology, described as the "avatar method" did prove to be a promising but underdeveloped technique of algorithm auditing, which digital researchers could employ to assess concerns over user experience and effects of social media algorithms. 

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Nowhere to Go, But Still Here: Patterns of Mobility and Displacement for Unsheltered Residents of Santa Cruz & North Monterey
Julian Crown

This project uses spatial tools to map patterns of movement and displacement for people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, investigating how they choose -- or are forced—to live in particular spaces. We map where individuals stay and analyze the factors that drive their movement, from safety and access to services to environmental threats and law enforcement presence. By tracing patterns of mobility and displacement, we illuminate challenges people experiencing homelessness face in their search for stability—and explore the implications for regional policy responses. 

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Garden
Dilbert Iraheta

Garden is a multimedia piece that weaves together digital audio recordings and creations with the analog fine art technique of painting. Through this blend, the work explores the tension between creation and destruction of our material world, focusing on the impact of declining biodiversity in woodland environments. Visitors are invited to listen and observe as artistic expression reveals the shifting patterns of the natural world.

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Measuring Disinformation in the 2024 Taiwan Presidential Election
Evan Quintana

Taiwan, which held a presidential election in early 2024, is one of the critical battlegrounds of influential disinformation campaigns by malign actors seeking to influence political outcomes. I intend to observe the presence, growth and effect of disinformation, and the growth in volume of posted content involved in discussion of disinformation narratives, related to topics in the 2024 Taiwan election. I intend to measure the propensity of online users to post content reflecting particular viewpoints on narratives and observing the patterns and flows of such content on media sources like X (Twitter at the time of the election), PTT (Taiwan's local parallel to Reddit), and LINE (Taiwan's parallel to WeChat). This research hopes to contribute to the body of work illuminating the interaction between the burgeoning dynamics of the contemporary information space and global democratic processes, a topic that will only gain gravity in the coming decades.

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The Bronze Age Archive
Jackson Young

thebronzeagearchive.com is a digital mapping project looking at on the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean. The map focuses on archaeological sites which exemplifies one of four categories: artistic traditions, religious traditions, sites of interconnectivity, and sites which were destroyed in the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Online information about the ancient world is often fraught with misinformation and pseudoscience, so the creation of a well sourced and enjoyable interactive map is necessary to properly disseminate archeological findings to the masses.

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The Writers Project
Alex Calderwood

"The Writer's Project" is a series of playful text editors, each meant to provide an unusual writing experience, taking cues from game design and concrete or kinetic poetry. It is also a critical design project. In the age of AI, spellcheck, autocorrect, and predictive text interfaces mediate and alter our expression in difficult to understand ways. Can we highlight the influence of these agencies while also providing creative, gamelike writing tools?

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Enhancing Digital Equity for the Earth’s Future: Bridging the Digital Divide with Intersectional Design
Michaela Barker

In this thesis project, I explored the intersection of natural language processing and human computer interaction through the interdisciplinary lenses of arts, humanities and engineering research frameworks. With an emphasis on accessibility in design and the expansion of language diversity in academia, I aimed to bridge linguistic and visual communication barriers through the development of a user interaction design for multilingual machine translation tooling.

Digital Project Showcase

The Digital Project Showcase is an opportunity for students to display their work and invite conversation. This portion of the day is similar to a poster session, with multiple projects set up around the DSC space and the ability for attendees to walk around and view each one; however, instead of printed posters, we work with presenters to provide the technology necessary to have their live digital project on display, including with relevant interactivity. Types of projects that we have showcased previously include websites, podcasts, YouTube channels, VR experiences, video games, short films, and 3D reconstructions. Projects can be individual or group work as long as all authors consent and are appropriately credited.

VizWall Presentations

The VizWall portion of the symposium provides an opportunity for students to engage in a formal presentation of their projects. Students will have a brief time slot (usually 5-10 minutes) to present in front of the DSC's VizWall, a 14'x4' screen. This type of presentation is similar to a conference presentation. While the event will be in person, presentations will be streamed and recorded via Zoom for remote viewers. All presenters will be provided a slide template and relevant presentation instructions. Presentation slides will be collected the day before the event. Please note that the VizWall is a server-run machine—it is not possible to connect your computer directly.

All presenters will be given the opportunity to create a single slide for the VizWall to showcase their project after the symposium has concluded for the remainder of Spring Quarter. More information will be provided to presentations upon their application's acceptance.