As of August 2017, I am proud to be a CLIR postdoctoral fellow in data services at the Claremont Colleges Library. It’s an amazing place!
Previously I spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin after completing my PhD in 2016.
In my research life, I examine the social structures that surround information and information systems. Sometimes information systems work well to help knowledge sharing between people. At other times, those systems don’t work so well, either by accident or design, and we end up misinformed or confused.
I used to be a reference librarian (here and here, among other places). I entered the field just as internet technologies were changing literally everything we thought we knew about how “information” works, in formal spaces like libraries and newspapers, but also out in the wild. I went back to school to investigate social questions of information trust and credibility in digital networks. My research there has led me to study a variety of information sharing across boundaries.
Science information is a particularly fruitful place for the kinds of research I like to do. For example, I’ve looked at discussions of vaccinations in medical literature and climate change reporting.
Most recently I am focusing on questions of open data, data journalism, digital libraries, and open science practices though a number of collaborations.
There are a lot of good questions out there.
email: jefinn AT utexas.edu
Jeanine Finn 