Veronika Post

Veronika Post is a Graduate student at Harvard Extension School working towards a Master’s degree in Software Engineering (ALM).

Veronika has also completed a Graduate Certificate in Data Science from HES. Her main interest is working with information, aka data. She served as a Teaching Assistant for several Data Science courses of various levels of difficulty at Harvard: CS109A Introduction to DS as well as its version on HarvardX, CS109B Advanced DS, and Bedrock Data Science.

Additionally, Veronika held Research Assistant and Faculty Aide positions. She loves discovering new patterns in data as well as new approaches to this process.

Veronika Post is speaking at the Digital Collections Summit 2024 :

Leveraging Data Science to Advance Equity

Racism has been deeply embedded in museums since their inception, as they acquired collections through colonial activities that oppressed indigenous peoples. Minority communities saw little representation in museums, while their artifacts were displayed without context.

Recent movements have pressured museums to confront their racist legacies. However, behind the scenes museum databases still rely on colonial terms assigned by early white collectors that promoted harmful stereotypes.

This presentation examines using data science to systematically uncover and replace derogatory language in a botanical collection database of over 1 million specimens.

The goal is provide a means to purge museums’ digital archives of racist ideologies that have inhibited diversity.