R.Stuart Geiger

  

I'm a Ph.D student at UC-Berkeley’s School of Information. My research is on communities of knowledge production in highly technologically-mediated environments -- the bulk of this has been on Wikipedia. I'm particularly interested in the relationship between social structures and technical infrastructures, such as the ways in which software platforms are built to enact certain ideals of governance and community. I approach this topic from a number of disciplinary angles, including media studies, sociology of science, social psychology, information and organization science, philosophy of technology, and more. Methodologically, I like to remain open to both qualitative and quantitative methods, and often use more statistical or analytical forms of analysis to contextualize and further support ethnography. In addition to my studies of Wikipedia, I’m also researching distributed networks of ecological scientists, as well as working on a qualitative research approach to studying mediated environments called ‘trace ethnography.’