My research program (orcid.org/0000-0001-7283-1098) emerges from abiding interest in knowledge production in interdisciplinary areas, especially but not exclusively library and information sciences. My background in interdisciplinary humanities and research expertise in science and technologies studies informs my investigation into the infrastructures needed to create knowledge in several domains. I am particularly interested in the epistemological ramifications of the tools we use for gathering, describing, storing, retrieving, and sharing knowledge. My CLIR postdoctoral fellowship has provided new tools for exploring the social lives of data, including GIS technologies and Twitter archiving.
In the Internet age, databases of all kinds play an important role in the day-to-day lives of non-scientists. These databases and the information infrastructures with which they are nested are crucial elements of ecologies that bring non-professional citizen scientists and historians-at-large together with professionals for the creation of new genetic knowledge. My research work is on the social, scientific, and technical development of databases through practices specific to lay communities engaging with science, particularly genetic genealogists and cattle breeders. I situate the social lives of data at the intersections of data curation, digital humanities, science and technology studies, and library and information science.
Genetic genealogists and cattle breeders collect, share, and analyze information in a welter of processes, technologies, and discourses I call “pedigree practices.” Cattle breeders and genetic genealogists collectively gather large quantities of data related to inheritance that are crucial to genetic knowledge production. The statistical processing of pedigrees and performance data enables cattle growers to predict the inheritance of valuable traits, called “expected progeny differences.” Genetic genealogists share family trees and genetic markers to extend their pedigrees and make inroads into the archival record. Databases are vital to these pursuits; additionally, the data kept and shared by these communities is a resource for the creation of new genetic knowledge by animal scientists, population geneticists, and biomedical researchers.
This project is an outgrowth of my graduate work on the construction of categories in information retrieval systems and other technologies, particularly in library and information science. It examines the impact of direct-to-consumer genetic testing on the social meanings of heredity and identity, the practices used to produce, organize, and mobilize those meanings, and the material effects of those practices. My interest here is in the meanings and interpretations that are embedded in the tools: the pedigree chart (and genealogical software) that insists on orderly, opposite-sex partnerships and biogenetic descent; the genetic tests that conflate race, nation, tribe, and population; and the notions of self and group that flow from the use of these tools in practice. The knowledge that can be produced through these databases is shaped by the information infrastructures that organize the data. Genealogical historians-at-large thus inevitably engage the race science that is congealed in the evolution of population genetics, entering the debates on race and sex-based medicine and surfacing nature-cultural notions of these and other categories.
Previously, I worked on two projects with colleagues in the E.V.O.K.E. Lab at UC Irvine. The first, on personal genomics and the Qualified Self movement, was a project under the theme of “Algorithmic Living.” We also teamed up with CalIT2 at UC San Diego to work on the Health Data Exploration project, to map the landscape of self-tracking and data sharing for public health purposes. I also worked with a team studying distributed collaborations and the information infrastructures that support those collaborations.
In addition to my going concerns, I am always passively and sometimes actively researching:
▪ Epistemology, classification, and categories, especially race, gender, and sexuality category work in information technologies.
▪ The social lives of data and data infrastructures; social media; new and old media.
▪ Feminist philosophy of science; history and sociology of science and technology; cultural studies and critical theory; poststructuralism; standpoint epistemology.
▪ Genetic testing, personal genomics, kinship studies, biotechnology, assisted reproductive technologies.
▪ Food justice and security; animal studies; animal geographies.