I’m R. Stuart Geiger, a  Ph.D student at UC-Berkeley’s School of Information.  The subtitle of this website is “technically human”, and I believe that is as good of a summation of my work as any.  The technologies we use (and those we don’t use) often form a core part of what makes us human, and I find that utterly fascinating.  

Most of my research is on highly technologically-mediated communities of knowledge production, and the bulk of my research has been on Wikipedia.  I approach this topic from a number of disciplinary angles, including media studies, sociology of science, critical social theory, information and organization science, philosophy of technology, and more – it helps to have never actually been indoctrinated into an single academic discipline.  

In terms of academic fields, I’m most in conversation with people from Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Science and Technology Studies (STS), and Actor-Network Theory (ANT).   Methodologically, I like to remain open to both qualitative and quantitative methods, and often use more statistical or analytical forms of analysis to contextualize and further support ethnography.  In addition to my studies of Wikipedia, I’m also researching  distributed networks of ecological scientists, as well as working on a qualitative research approach to studying mediated environments called ‘trace ethnography.’