I have been on the faculty of the UC Berkeley School of Information (formerly the School of Information Management and Systems) since its inception in 1995. Before that, I was on the faculty of its predecessor, the School of Library and Information Studies.

My work is in three major areas:

New Media: Visual Technologies and Personal Digital Memory

My current research combines approaches from new media, visual anthropology and sociology, visual culture, and human-computer interaction (HCI). Personal photography has been one of the most successful -- even loved -- consumer technologies of the last century. Now new technologies are making it increasingly possible for "ordinary" users to create, share, use, re-use, and remix visual and other media to support their activities, including social networking. Images are powerful in themselves, and important social media.

I seek to understand (1) existing and emergent uses of new visual technologies such as photography and video, and, more broadly, the power, meaning, and uses of visual media, and (2) what the success of personal photography can tell us about the processes of technology adoption and appropriation.

I periodically teach an interdisciplinary seminar on this topic. During Spring, 2008, I taught a course with Elizabeth Churchill on Personal Digital Memory where we looked at a variety of issues related to digital media and memory, one of the major traditional (and current) uses of visual as well as otherpersonal media.

More about my research.

Science and Technology Studies (STS)

STS is an interdisciplinary field concerned with (1) the development of knowledge within epistemic communities, and (2) the interaction between technology and the social. It is a source of concepts, methods, and precedents for a critical approach to information and communication technologies, and to the field of HCI.

I teach course I212, Information and Society, as an ever-changing seminar, usually in science and technology studies (STS) as it relates to information studies and systems.

Human Computer Interaction (HCI)

I have expertise in user experience research and evaluation. My work is grounded in the emerging field of critical HCI,,rooted in STS and related areas, toquestion assumptions about technology, users, designers, , and the relationships among them.

I created and teach our course I214, Needs and Usability Assessment, which addresses (1) major concepts in user experience research, including both user needs and preferences, and post-implementation evaluation; and (2) methods, both applied social science research methods, and more informal methods used in user experience research. We take a address the basic concepts and methods with which a practicing professional must be familiar.

This page last revised 9 July 2011