Hello all,

As I mentioned in class, I am a first year PhD in English composition. I’m also doing the DSAM certificate. With my background as a composition teacher and a writing programs/instruction librarian I am very interested in how students interact with information objects in writing contexts. This might include student source evaluation behaviors, research writing, source synthesis, or citation analysis in student research papers.

I found out about this seminar from my literary theory professor last semester who helped me understand some of the overlap between cultural criticism and the work being done in the information sciences regarding data, algorithmic oppression, post-humanism, and media studies. When I was a librarian I read Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression and in some ways it was one of the reasons I applied to come back to grad school. While the ways she talked about information were not new to me, using the Black feminist lens applied so directly in this context was. I appreciated the way it shocked my thinking.

So with that in mind, some of my  goals for this class are to see how different disciplines imagine of information systems. What are the different lenses by which they engage with, and unravel, information ecosystems? How might some of these methodologies inform the research I will be conducting for my dissertation eventually?

-Elise