Last updated: 14 August 2012

I’ll be starting my third year here at the UC-Berkeley School of Information.  I’m taking my exams at the end of September, and then I’ll be working on my dissertation proposal for the rest of the semester.  This summer, I was at ICWSM and Wikimania, and I’ll be headed to WikiSym at the end of August, Infosocial and 4S in October, and then a workshop on “Code as Control in Online Spaces” in January 2013.  Right now, I’m working on submissions for CSCW 2013, CHI 2013, and the iConference 2013,

My current research projects and trajectories include (I promise to fill these in later):

• Wikipedia as a socio-technical system

I’ve been studying Wikipedia ever since 2006, when I started writing my senior thesis, a DeToqueville-inspired take on policies and administration titled Democracy in Wikipedia.  Since then, I’ve taken a far more socio-technical approach to Wikipedia, focusing on the social roles of software, specifically fully-automated bots and semi-automated scripting tools.  My work has studied their roles in the identification and banning of vandals, the ways they are contested and negotiated by Wikipedians, and the often negative effects they have on newcomers.  I’m also interested in issues of newcomer socialization, such as in Wikipedia’s notoriously opaque article deletion processes.

• Trace ethnography and trace literacy
• Socialization in scientific research networks
• Towards an ethnography of robots (and not robotics)