Information Work Research Group at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information

Ciaran Trace

IWRG Director

Trace’s research interests cross the areas of archives and material cultural, with a particular focus on the nature, meaning, and function of documents in everyday life. Her work has been published in archival and information science journals such as Archival Science, Archivaria, Archives and Manuscripts, Information and Culture, Journal of the American Society 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).

PhD in library and information science from UCLA.

Diane Bailey

Bailey recently led a ten-year study of the role of advanced IT, including sophisticated computational software, in engineering analysis and design, resulting in publications in top organizational studies, engineering, and communication journals. With an expertise in organizational ethnography, she favors large-scale empirical studies, often involving multiple occupations, countries, and researchers. Her current research investigates remote occupational socialization, or how, via IT, individuals learn and perform occupations far from communities of similar practitioners.

BS, MS, and PhD industrial engineering and operations research University of California, Berkeley

Tanya Clement

Clement’s general research interests include digital humanities as it impacts academic research libraries and digital collections, research tools and (re)sources in the context of future applications, humanities informatics, and humanities data curation. Her research is informed by theories of knowledge representation, information theory, mark-up theory, social text theory, and theories of information visualization. Her other areas of inquiry include modernist literature, scholarly editing, and digital literacies. Her work involves imagining what we don’t know by evaluating and rethinking how institutions curate humanities data and how humanists do scholarship in the contexts that result from changing resources and technologies.

AB, American History and Literature, Harvard University; MFA, Fiction, University of Virginia; MA, PhD English Literature and Language, University of Maryland, College Park

James Howison

Howison’s research examines the impact of information technology on the organization of work. Work is increasingly imbued with information; not only is it facilitated by information technologies but the objects being worked on are themselves made up of information (e.g., software; designs; media; financial products and customer information). Howison’s work examines how work is, or can be, restructured by these changes, examining phenomena such as open source software, Wikipedia, corporate crowd-sourcing, and new types of scientific collaboration. His current projects include studying the organization of software development in science and the motivational power of mutually visible work.

B. economics (social sciences) hons University of Sydney; PhD information science and technology Syracuse University

William Aspray

Past founding member

Aspray has co-authored two major national studies on IT work: The Supply of Information Technology Workers in the United States (Computing Research Association, 1999) and Globalization and Offshoring of Software (ACM, 2006). He is interested in the supply and demand of IT workers, US politics of information work and workers, offshoring and outsourcing, regional advantage, and health information work. His current research involves the politics of offshoring.

BA mathematics, philosophy Wesleyan University; MA mathematics Wesleyan University; MA, PhD history of science Wisconsin-Madison

Lecia Barker

Past founding member

Barker conducts research on the social settings and typical practices of career preparation for technical information workers. Her studies focus on how social and educational climates subtly shape participants’ development – or lack of development – of identity and belonging as an information technology worker, and how climates influence the attraction, retention, and advancement of groups underrepresented in professional information technology careers. She applies this research in her role as Senior Research Scientist for the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

BA linguistics, Spanish, and Portuguese; MBA marketing; PhD communication

Daniel Carter

Daniel studies how emerging technologies influence work in a variety of fields. His current research looks at how computational techniques are negotiated between different research communities. He also studies online labor, with a focus on product promotion and marketing.

Nick Gottschlich

Nick Gottschlich is a doctoral student with an interest in researching open source software and open data, and especially how technology facilitates and affects collaboration in these environments. He is currently on a leave of absence, working in Austin at data.world.

Nida Kazim

Nida Kazim is a phd candidate at University of Texas at Austin. Her research interest is women in technology, specifically Pakistani women in technology. For her dissertation, Nida plans on exploring this field further and uncovering similar areas of interest for Pakistani women who are actively enrolled in technology related programs in the United States. Before her life as an aspiring academic, Nida worked as a technical Project Manager for a financial and services company and has firsthand experience on being a woman in technology. She thinks that this experience helps in her understanding the subject matter and aims to understand the field not just as someone who has experienced it, but as an academic.

Dan Sholler

Dan Sholler is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies large-scale digital technology implementations and their implications for work practices, organizational structures, and social dynamics. His research uses ethnographic techniques to understand how work supported by the same digital technologies varies within and across different organizational settings. Dan’s current research investigates the implications of electronic health record and clinical decision support system implementations for healthcare practitioners. He has also conducted studies of information professionals and their work, including data scientists and records managers. He publishes his research in organization science, information systems, and information science outlets. Dan holds a B.A. in Science, Technology, and Society from the University of Pennsylvania.