Dr. Lucy Havens is researcher, data scientist, designer, and writer. She creates physical interfaces with tangible materials, digital interfaces with code, and hybrid (physical + digital) interfaces. Through her work, Havens explores ways to make what is invisible or ignored, visible. As a designer, she uses speculative, data-driven, and human-centered methods to visually communicate information about topics ranging from environmental concerns to the contents of library collections. As a researcher and data scientist, her work lies at the intersection of responsible machine learning and artificial intelligence, human-data interaction, visualization, and cultural heritage. Most recently, she has developed a natural language processing approach to identifying gender biases in archival catalog metadata descriptions.
Havens earned a Ph.D. from the Institute for Language, Cognition, and Computation at the University of Edinburgh. Currently, she is an affiliate at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Centre for Technomoral Futures, and Centre for Data, Culture & Society, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She won the Edinburgh College of Art Purchase Award for her master's dissertation, Physically Encoding Collection Metadata, in 2019, and her work with the National Library of Scotland was shortlisted for the Digital Humanities Awards in 2020. She received her undergraduate degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 2015, where she studied Information Systems, French, and English and played on the Women's Varsity Soccer team.
Outside academia, Havens has held positions of research software engineer, web developer and designer, graphic designer, and business and technology consultant. She has worked in numerous industries, including libraries, archives, energy and utilities, retail, private equity, and finance. Her past clients and collaborators include the Alan Turing Institute, British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Trust for Scotland, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, and University of Edinburgh's Library & University Collections.
Havens is available for full-time, freelance, and part-time work, based either in the US or remotely. Please get in touch if you'd like to chat!
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