Meet Sam Raby, our Web Tools Developer intern! A recent graduate of Wesleyan University, Sam joined our team in October and has been working to build our new online map focusing on the city’s one dollar lot sales. With a background in math and data analysis, Sam is a strong believer that justice, advocacy, and storytelling should inform technology, and not the other way around. Through working with GIS mapping, data journalism, and interactive media development, he is always looking to bring a critical perspective into the world of data and technology.

Before joining our team, Sam spend his summer interviewing Syrian refugees across central Europe as part of a four-month oral history project. The project, called Placing Oral Histories, was a recreation of an archive he made documenting his family’s history of displacement from Baghdad, Iraq, in the late 1960s. Growing up with these stories, Sam always felt that his family’s oral histories of displacement had a geographic component to them that he wanted to record. So, he used maps and interactive media to trace the geography behind them, and he has since extended his work to documenting other histories, specifically ones in the Syrian diaspora. Check out the project here!