Research

My research travels the broad stretches of the past and the present conditions of encyclopedic media to understand the democratic potential of knowledge, the gender inequalities that emerge from knowledge systems, and the way practices of knowing shape digital culture.

Most of my research began with short a question: What is it about Wikipedia that makes it a new? I found that this question was not answerable by looking at Wikipedia alone. In my graduate studies I looked to the history of encyclopedias and compared Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica within the genre of encyclopedias; as well as the broader topic of the political design of encyclopedic media. In the process, I encountered the fact that Wikipedia's knowledge is fundamentally shaped by its reliance on contradictory definitions of consensus and that these definitions resonate with the democratic design of Wikipedia's interface in a myriad of ways.

This has lead me to a consideration of how Wikipedia's techniques play a part in its multilingual policy development.

But it is not just Wikipedia that gravitates towards consensus, there are other digital projects that have either repurposed Wikipedia or consensus for their own epistemological and political goal. In fact, the history of digital culture's relationship to knowledge in the early twenty-first century is bound to the Wikipedia imaginaire. On a different front, democratically-oriented digital projects such as blockchain technologies or the Internet Engineering Task Force use consensus as a technique and consensus as a metaphor.

Projects & Publications

Figure Nº.2 Gender Bias on Wikipedia