anne lee steele
I’m a researcher based in the United Kingdom. (Schedule a chat here!)
Most of what I do aims to understand and support the people & processes behind our digital lives (think: open source infrastructure, extractive industries, and supply chains). I approach most situations as an ethnographer first, and as a community-builder second.
Currently, I am the community manager for The Turing Way, based at the Alan Turing Institute, where I am stewarding an open source, community-driven resource for reproducible data science.
Previously, I was a mentor for Open Life Science, cohort #5. I was also an Early Career Fellow at the Internet Society, where I investigated low earth orbit (LEO) satellite supply chains, and was a co-curator of The Re:source Project, which was incubated at Wikimedia Deutchland’s Unlock Accelerator.
Most recently, I completed my MA at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, where I learned about open geospatial data and humanitarian mapping practices on OpenStreetMap with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. From 2020-2021, I was a Reproducible Research Fellow at the Open Knowledge Foundation. I remain associated with the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding, more specifically with the Transparency Lab.
Before moving to Switzerland, I researched conservation in Bhutan, co-led student expeditions in Nepal, and coded data visualizations for a Washington DC think tank. As an undergraduate at Columbia University, I studied global cities and natural resource conflict. I also designed media for different organizations in New York City, and organized a technology-arts festival in New Zealand. While I grew up in the shadow of the oil industry in Texas, I was born in Chicago, and mostly raised in a big blue van – and on big bowls of miyeok-guk (미역국).
When I’m not on a computer, I’m usually outside – recording soundscapes, chasing waves to surf or finding mountains to climb.
featured projects
- above the clouds and below the sea
- the re:source project
- the atlas of extractive industries (coming soon)
featured writing
If you’re interested in learning more about works in progress, check out my digital garden. For somewhat more coherent thoughts and reflections, read my blog.
- “omnivorous analysis” (logic magazine, 2022)
- “endings, beginnings, and reflections” (open knowledge foundation frictionless fellows blog, 2021)
- “the ‘open’ movement and its discontents” (the graduate institute, 2020)
- “who writes the first draft of history?” (the graduate press, 2020)
talks + workshops
- “rendering supply chain research in the vector economy” (transmediale, upcoming 2022, slides)
- “crisis maps, community, and corporations: an anthropologist’s perspective” (hot summit, 2021, slides)
- “seeing like a supply chain” (mozfest, 2022, slides)
- “mapathons: spaces of care and cartography” (grists, harvard sts 2021)
- “data visualization and crowdsourced research: experiments in collective storytelling” (csvconf, rightscon, 2021, slides)
- “the social life of (our) supply chains” (mozfest, 2021, slides)
other
- “i am not an artist” (portfolio zine, 2019)
- “supply chains are us” - (digital collages, 2021)
- open-source-social-science (open source project, 2020)
- supply-chains.us (digital collage, 2021)
- “the architecture of good intentions” (design mock-up, 2019)