Conflicting garden records create an interest in archives, information design, and community authority.
The garden card read, ‘June 14—rain, two jars.’ I entered it into a spreadsheet as weather and harvest data. Mrs. Alvarez laughed: two jars meant tomato-blight samples. Stars marked saved seeds; question marks sometimes meant produce donated before weighing. My clean table was accurate only because I had removed the marks I could not explain. I began interviewing gardeners and attaching their accounts to scanned cards. When memories conflicted, we kept both.
That drawer made me interested in how information systems turn uncertain human records into searchable categories. At Cornell, I would connect humanistic study of archives with information science methods for metadata, interface design, and participatory research. I want to examine how a catalog can reveal disagreement without making it unusable, and how contributors can retain meaningful control after material goes online. Cornell's breadth is valuable here because the question crosses history, design, computing, and the ethics of community partnership rather than fitting neatly within one technique.
I would bring the consent checklist and narrator-review workflow our garden developed, expecting both to change when tested with communities that have different reasons to distrust collection. The question I want to pursue is no longer what an old card means. It is who gains the authority to stabilize that meaning, how interfaces distribute that authority, and when a responsible system should deliberately preserve uncertainty. Cornell would let me follow that question from material records to computational structures while keeping the people represented by the data inside the process of describing it.
Original teaching sample written by the Writivia team. It is not a real student's submitted essay and does not imply admission to Cornell University.