I’m R. Stuart Geiger, a first-year Ph.D student at UC-Berkeley’s School of Information.  I’m just now getting settled into the bay area, but things are looking good.  For the past year, I was a researcher at Georgetown University, working in the Communication, Culture, and Technology program.  I finished up my master’s degree at CCT in May 2009, and was assisting with my advisor, David Ribes, on a variety of projects regarding technologies of scientific collaboration.   We were mainly doing an ethnographic study of ecological research networks, but we did some work studying the technological infrastructure for the Large Hadron Collider, the history of molecular modelling software in the 1980s.   Before that, I was an undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin in the Humanities Honors program, where I focused mainly on philosophy and media studies.

I do a lot of work on communities of knowledge production in highly technologically-mediated environments, 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.  At the moment, I’m continuing my research into ecological science, as well as the work on one of our qualitative research techniques — what we’re calling ‘trace ethnography.’