About

Ciaran B. Trace is an Associate Professor at the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree and a Higher Diploma in Archival Studies from University College Dublin and a PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of California at Los Angeles. She has taught previously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Trace’s work explores what constitutes a literate society, and the role that recorded information plays in creating and sustaining literate environments (both personal and professional). Her work has been published in Information and Culture, Archival Science, Archivaria, Archives and Manuscripts, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, and the Journal of Documentation. Her work has also appeared in the proceedings of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL), Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL), and the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIST).

Andrew Dillon is the V.M. Daniel Professor of Information Studies at the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin. A graduate of the National University of Ireland (Cork, B.A. and M.A. first class) and Loughborough University (Ph.D. Psychology), he was appointed Research Fellow at the Human Sciences & Advanced Technology Research Institute in the UK before moving to Indiana University where, amongst other duties, he developed and served as the founding Director of the Masters in Human-Computer Interaction at the School of Informatic. In 2002 he joined the School of Information at UT-Austin and served here as dean for 15 years. His research centers on human behavior and cognition in the context of information and has been funded by NSF, Microsoft Research, and SLA among others. He has authored more than 100 papers, including four books, and is currently working on a framing of information infrastructures that draws on a richer understanding of humans as users.

Selena Dickey is a PhD candidate in the University of Texas at Austin’s Radio-TV-Film department. Alongside managing Information & Culture, she also serves as co-managing editor of The Velvet Light Trap and Flow Journal and is the Graduate Student Representative for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies' Media Industries special interest group. Her dissertation focuses on early television distribution infrastructures, particularly the unique ways they became embedded in secluded, remote environments and communities to understand how place shapes and is shaped by sociotechnical and industrial systems.

Emily Vernon is a second-year masters student in the School of Information, where she examines patterns of information dissemination and internalization. She centers much of her research on the politicization of sports, seeing benefit in understanding how activism moves from the digital to the personal realm and how cultural entertainment becomes totemic. In addition to her role at Information & Culture, she is a teaching assistant for a communications course in the Cockrell School of Engineering and a consultant at the University Writing Center, where she enjoys collaborating with students from all disciplines to communicate information in an effective, persuasive, and compelling manner.

Amelia Acker is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin. She studies the emergence and standardization of new information objects and data traces communication networks. Currently, she is researching data cultures, information infrastructures and digital preservation contexts that support long-term cultural memory. Amelia’s current research program addresses emerging digital traces and mobile computing cultures that are shaped by new data collection practices amongst different kinds of users, designers, technologists, and institutions. Her research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and has been published in journals such as the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Archival Science, and the Annals of the History of Computing.

James A. Hodges is Fred M. Bullard Postdoctoral research Fellow at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a Ph.D. from the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information, as well as an M.A. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University. His research addresses the materiality of digital evidence, using techniques from digital forensics to examine digital media production and distribution practices. By reverse-engineering digital objects, James has studied the role of uncredited labor in distributing cultural resources ranging from repair manuals to historical archives and pirated software, with research appearing in venues like the Internet History, Information Research, and the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.