Software Curation Librarian and CLIR Fellow at the Penn State University Libraries
I study computational practices in the sciences and humanities to understand changing conditions of knowledge production. Building on approaches from information studies, science studies, and media studies, my research examines negotiations between epistemological and computational values in digital scholarship. My current work concerns the emergence of software as a form of scholarly communication.
Software curation is an emerging area of interest in scientific computing and digital scholarship. An outgrowth of data curation and the open science movement, software curation is motivated by the recognition—largely from funding agencies and open science advocates—that computer programs are an increasingly central (yet precarious!) category of scientific production. In partnership with the wider field of digital curation, software curators work to define and perform practices that preserve and sustain scientific knowledge constituted in research software (software created in the course of research). The work of defining software curation is an active area of research in library and information studies. Through empirical research of scholarly software development and curation practices, I hope to contribute to both the conceptualization and critique of software curation.
I am an occasional web developer and technical collaborator. A few of the projects I have worked on are listed here.
Triple Canopy is an online magazine based in New York. I developed and maintained the magazine’s backend & content management systems. I currently work with Triple Canopy as a consultant.
Bago — I’m working on an implementation of the BagIt specification (used in data archiving) written in Go.
Local/Global: Mapping Nineteenth-Century London’s Art Market — I worked with Anne Helmreich (The Getty) to analyze historical arts sales.
Birds of the Internet/CASE — I developed a web-based database tool for organizing and visualizing case studies on internet-enabled participation (see Kelty et al. 2015; Kelty and Erickson 2018).