Bio-sketch

Lindsay Poirier is an associate professor in Information Studies at Indiana University and has a co-appointment in their Web Science program. She also directs an undergraduate Digital Studies program, where students engage in experimental coding lab-work to explore the politics of open data movements, big data, data structures, algorithms, and visualization tools. As a cultural anthropologist, Lindsay’s research analyzes digital information infrastructures – from data structures to the standards-setting institutions (such as the W3C) – through the lens of experimental ethnography. Trained in STS, she questions how the logics of information infrastructures – informed by diverse designer worldviews and socio-political climates – shape what is permitted to become knowledge in digital systems. Her first book, //The Culture of Information Architecture: an Ethnography of Data Structures in Digital Information Systems//, unpacks the history, logics, and politics of various information architectures, including digital content management systems, the Semantic Web, and mapping software. It goes on to argue that the binds of structuration – even when pushed to the limit – produce information margins, and questions how information architectures could be designed critically to highlight such margins. Lindsay has also published a number of articles on the history of knowledge representation in artificial intelligence, articulating how competing epistemological and metaphysical foundations have shaped various approaches to modeling knowledge in AI. Lindsay is an editor for the Journal of Feminist Code Studies. Keywords: information infrastructure, digital humanities, history of artificial intelligence, big data, Web Studies