Melissa Chalmers

I am a second year PhD student at the School of Information, University of Michigan. My background is in anthropology and cultural studies. I am interested in emerging infrastructure to support multi-modal digital scholarship, as well as the distribution and preservation of this scholarly output. More specifically, I am interested in changing relationships among technologies, content, and knowledge production practices across humanities disciplines; between new and old ways of doing things (and the translations and trading zones required to navigate these changes); and questions about what gets left behind or excluded in these processes.

For the past year I’ve been studying large-scale text digitization projects (e.g. Google Books) and the use of their output across a number of use contexts, from library collection development to collaborative, computational humanities projects using digitized texts as data. I am interested in the ways that agency and expertise are diffused and distributed widely across people, teams, tools, and institutional arrangements.