D-Lab: A community with inclusion at its core

While taking a statistics class as part of her joint JD/PhD program at UC Berkeley, Renata Barreto realized she needed to use Python programming for assignments. So she looked for help refreshing and deepening those skills.

She found support at D-Lab, a learning community that helps Berkeley scholars conduct data intensive social science and humanities research. She’s stayed involved with the lab since, solidifying her programming interest, teaching Python, researching online hate speech using computational tools and preparing for potential industry jobs that weren’t on her radar before.

“I found that having an instructor that taught the ins and outs of programming was really helpful in terms of how it clarified my career path,” said Barreto. As she’s grown with the lab, she’s also been able to focus on publishing research that “wouldn't have been possible without having the values of D-Lab, things like equity and justice, at the forefront.”

Barreto’s story is common among the thousands of students, faculty and staff served by D-Lab since it opened in 2013. Its peer consulting, training and data availability for scholars at Berkeley helps individuals, especially graduate students, pass graduate programs, conduct social science computational research and identify careers in an inclusive environment.

The lab has been unique from the start. Graduate students were seen as leaders and key participants from its inception. It focused on both qualitative and quantitative research. These decisions defied norms at the time, and enabled women, underrepresented minorities and graduate students to shape the lab’s research and culture into an equity-driven, welcoming space. It then provided a scaffold for Berkeley’s data science landscape as other programs started on campus.

“The lab was really built around empowering graduate students and seeing them as forces of change [with] the understanding that meant giving power to groups that had suffered under status differentials,” said Cathryn Carson, D-Lab’s founding director who is now chair of Berkeley’s History Department. “We were able to talk explicitly about these racial, class, gender and status divides in our research and how we wanted to overcome them.”

Now “our graduate students come out of the lab with both the experience of doing [research and teaching] on their own and a social justice orientation in a field where that's not taken for granted,” Carson said.

‘It’s OK Not to Know’

Carla Hesse, who was the dean of Berkeley’s Division of Social Sciences, had the idea to create the lab coming out of the recession of 2008 and 2009, Carson said. Hesse identified computational research as an area the division should invest in for future graduate students. The fastest, most effective way to do that: provide consulting and training outside of classes. 

The imagined lab providing that support would bridge gaps between those who wanted to learn these skills and the upper-level classes that implement them. It would be a welcoming environment for beginners and also eliminate some monetary barriers by offering work stations with expensive computing programs and data for students to use for free.

“At the time I felt this attitude going around that if you don’t already know [how to use these tools], then you don’t deserve to be taught,” said Rochelle Terman, one of the first D-Lab graduate student leaders and now an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. “It ended up being people like women and underrepresented minorities or people from non-techie fields that were shut out.”

That common experience resulted in the lab’s initially implicit approach and eventually explicit slogan of, “It’s okay not to know.” Today, graduate students say that slogan and atmosphere made them comfortable asking questions and gave them confidence to work through programming challenges.

D-Lab is focused on serving and hiring diverse participants, especially historically marginalized populations. They look at the data, tracking demographic groups’ participation to understand who they are and aren’t reaching. They also focus on listening and empathizing.

“We're actively seeking diversity in everything that we do because we know that it increases the quality of the work and because it brings more perspectives and eyes to bear on the work,” said Claudia von Vacano, one of the lab’s founders who is now its executive director. “If we’re able to address our needs – and I’ll say ‘our’ because I am from a marginalized community – then we’re able to address needs universally.”