iSchool students are at the forefront of research when it comes to culture, technology and information science. Their work expands into the unknown and maps out new territories of theoretical and practical knowledge.
It is likely that the SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) has noticed, recently providing three of our doctoral students with funding totaling more than $265,000.
Emily Maemura, Jack Jamieson and Jamilé Ghaddar are thrilled with the recognition their research, and the opportunity and space to fund their projects.
THE DOCTORAL PROJECTS
Jamilé Ghaddar’s funding is $80,000 over four years, or $20,000 per year. Specifically, her doctoral research focuses on issues of memory, history and identity in Middle Eastern & North African (MENA) archival settings.
“It is concerned with how archives in and of Lebanon, and across the region, can show the lives of its people outside of elitist and paternalistic frameworks given the conditions of ongoing war and material heritage destruction,” she says.
Jamilé’s research examines questions such as: to what ends do archives in Lebanon and the region operate? What stories do they allow us to tell? And how can scholarship critique, intervene in, and make sense of them? To answer these, Jamilé aims to develop intellectual work to counter reductive images of faraway others by elucidating and historicizing the complexities of knowledge production in Arab archival settings.
Jack Jamieson was granted funding at $35,000 per year over three years totaling $105,000. His research seeks to answer the question, “What values and ethics are embedded in the infrastructures of Web development?” Jack explains that the content of a website has no moral direction, however Web development tools like HTML influence the structure of the Web. As Jack puts it, “structure shapes what behaviours and modes of participation are possible when creating or interacting with a website.”
Jack points out that the structure of the website has changed shifting to a focus on web applications. Accompanying these changes are, “competition and debates involving different values such as openness, proprietorship, security, privacy, and universality,” Jack says. He continues, “These values have been inscribed into various aspects of Web technologies.”
Emily Maemura will be receiving $35,000 a year for three years. Her main research interest lies in digital curation, examining how born-digital objects and documents are managed, preserved, and made available for future use. Specifically, she is exploring the needs for the management and curation of research data in social sciences and humanities fields that study the internet and online sources.
Emily first became interested in digital preservation and curation through her coursework in the MI (Master of Information) program in Information Systems and Design. Taking courses on digital preservation with her research advisor, Professor Christoph Becker, laid the foundations of understanding the challenges for maintaining authentic digital information over long periods of time.
Emily further points out, designing information systems with long-term sustainability in mind requires interdisciplinary work, addressing both social and technical systems and constraints. Since information and communication technologies have become integral to the research process in most fields of study, Emily believes this work in research data management is essential for the future of scholarship to enable further analysis.
Congratulations to these doctoral students!
