Rachel Daniell

Rachel Daniell, PhD, is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt School of Information. They are an interdisciplinary scholar interested in temporality, spatiality, documentation, and metadata as they intersect with human rights, social justice, and historical memory. They also work with the critical and creative play made possible through performative arts.

With a background that includes qualitative data projects, advocacy related to human rights, publications on social memory, and over fifteen years of experience in the nonprofit sector, they are interested in examining the ways we structure information and the impact of these choices on sociocultural and sociopolitical life.

Their current research explores different systems for organizing information and representations of space, time, and events in data visualization. They also participate in collaborative research work toward more accurate and robust accounting of the deaths of persons in migration at the US-Mexico border as part of a multi-state working group of academic researchers, humanitarian organizations, and medico-legal professionals. In NYC, they are part of the Data Through Design (DxD: datathroughdesign.com) curator-organizer team, co-creating annual exhibitions of art based on civic open data, and they have worked collaboratively with multiple research initiatives at Pratt Institute. They are passionately interested in how different documentation and data projects can contribute to our understanding of underrepresented histories and spark imaginaries for potential futures.

At Pratt they have taught in areas related to information studies, information and human rights, GIS & design, interactive web mapping, web and database technologies, and the underappreciated beauties of data cleaning. In their work with students, they aim to help them hone their technology and storytelling skills, further their critical approaches, and artfully develop their own projects incorporating data and narrative.

PhD, Anthropology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York 

MS, Data Analytics & Visualization, with Advanced Certificate in Spatial Analysis & Design, Pratt Institute School of Information

Certificate, Media & Social Change, The New School

BA, Comparative Literature, NYU