At the moment, I am getting into the spring semester here at Georgetown. Last spring, I graduated from the Communication, Culture, and Technology program with my master’s degree, and I have applied to a number of Ph.D programs for next fall. In the mean time, I am working with Dr. David Ribes (my thesis advisor) on a research project funded by the National Science Foundation. We are studying cyberinfrastructures of science, specifically looking at technology use and development in scientific research networks.  I am also working on revising portions of my thesis, titled Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production, for publication and presentation.

Conferences

I’ve just returned from WikiWars: A Critical Point of View, a conference sponsored by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India in which I presented a paper titled “The Wisdom of Bots: A Critique of Self-Organization in Wikipedia”.  This week (2/6), I’m supposed to be at the 2010 conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in Savannah, Georgia, presenting a paper titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal”.  I say ’supposed to’ because the great snomageddon of 2010 has made travel near-impossible, but I hope to get there on time.  In late March, I’ll be at “A Critical Point of View” part II, sponsored by the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, presenting a paper titled “Bot Politics: The Domination, Subversion, and Negotiation of Code in Wikipedia.”