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Research

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My research is interdisciplinary, inductive, qualitative and quantitative. I participate in a number of small group, multi-sited collaborations and carry out individual research investigations. Here are some brief descriptions of my current projects, each are in various stages of development (writing, data collection, prototyping) and are carried out with different collaborators—technologists, information scientists, historians, archivists, and artists. Some of the themes that cut across my current projects are the interpretation of data, preservation and loss of digital traces, infrastructures, and the transmission of information through time.

The Power to Name Data
For the past few years I’ve been examining the role that metadata standards feature into our experiences of platforms and information practices. Metadata, or the systems and approaches that are used to name data, control how we represent the world and what we can know about it. I have written about representing death to govern data subjects with platform metadata. In 2018, when I was visitor at Data & Society Research Institute, I wrote a report about data craft techniques that use metadata categories being hacked, hijacked, and manipulated to play with automated moderation algorithms. Since then, I have collaborated with Dr. Joan Donovan and others to develop techniques of reading metadata as a method for critical internet studies.

Mobile Computing Cultures and Data Stories
Beginning with my research on participatory sensing apps and community data campaigns in 2010, I have been particularly focused on mobile devices and on the data traces associated with mobile technologies, namely, GPS coordinates, call data records, and text messages. With a number of collaborators (Brian Beaton, Brad Fidler, Matthew Mayernik, and Jed Brubaker), I have taken up historical, conceptual, and critical accounts of metadata, “infradata”, and trace data that support networked communication infrastructures—ranging from social media platforms like Facebook or Tinder, ARPANET, to smart cars. An overall goal of these data stories is to identify human assumptions made about the origination and transmission of trace data that inadvertently come to be built into the design and deployment of large-scale information infrastructures that support mobile computing.

Data Hermeneutics
I am currently completing several treatments of data in mobile computing cultures in preparation for a monograph that I am writing about data archives and their futures. This work will extend my recent research on data culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. With this work, I am developing a theoretical understanding of “data” by examining epistemological shifts in people’s understandings of evidence and digital archives since the establishment of data banks and the rise of database processing in the 1970s. My goals for the project are to demonstrate the complexities involved in the maintenance and repair of digital infrastructures that support data archives, and to import archival theories of forgetting, destruction, and impermanence into data science and digital preservation policies and applications. I see the project shaping the emerging field of critical data studies, of which I have been actively contributing to with my work on the hermeneutics of data in computing history.

If you would like more information about my work, a quote, or pre-prints related to these projects, please email me.