Welcome!

Hello! My name is Megan Finn and I am an Associate Professor at American University’s School of Communication. I can be reached by email at finn at american dot edu. I am also an Affiliate Associate Professor at University of Washington in the Information School.

This website provides a narrative overview of my work. Please see my ORCHID for more details. If you would like to read any of my publications or would like a current copy of my CV, please don’t hesitate to email me!

My work examines relations among institutions, infrastructures, information, data, and practices in the mediation and making of publics. I examine these themes in a book, called Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters, with MIT Press (2018). The book is an examination of public information infrastructures after earthquakes in Northern California in 1868, 1906, and 1989 and how they worked and didn’t at the very moment when people most wanted to communicate. I also analyze the institutions, policies, and technologies that shape 2018’s postdisaster information landscape. Information orders—complex constellations of institutions, technologies, and practices—influence how we act in, experience, and document events. What I term event epistemologies, constituted both by historical documents and by researchers who study them, explain how information orders facilitate particular possibilities for knowledge.

Current Research:

I have been building on the work in Documenting Aftermath in several collaborative projects:

• On a transnational team of researchers from communications, information science, and STS, I investigate the work of building COVID data infrastructures in the United State and India. Our work is funded by the NSF and by an Digital Infrastructures grant sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Omidyar Network, Open Society Foundations, and Mozilla Open Source Support Program. We have authored several articles on this work and we are working on a book.

In addition to my work on infrastructures in times of crisis, I do historical and contemporary empirical studies of responsible computing and data governance:

• With Katie Shilton, I am tracing the development of ethics projects in Computer Science. Our article in Social Studies of Science explains our empirically grounded approach to analyzing Ethics Governance Development in computing.
• With Amelia Acker (co-PI), Yubing Tian (PhD Candidate, UW), and Thomas Struett (PhD student, American University) I am working on an NSF-sponsored project about Scientific Data Governance, Preservation and Archiving. We investigate the life of scientific data, specifically in relation to NSF’s requirement for Data Management Plans with a focus on the relationship between national science policies and different epistemic cultures. Please see some of our current research out

Past projects:

Throughout my work, I bring together perspectives and approaches from information studies, science and technology studies, and the history of media, information, and communication. My research engages questions that require historical and contemporary analysis, including: How do changing technological infrastructures, information practices, and technology policies shape one another? I worked on several collaborative projects that have concluded:

• Along with Anna Lauren Hoffmann, and Marika Cifor I worked on building a research group called the AfterLab. You can read more about it here.
• I worked with Mike Ananny examining anticipatory infrastructures. In our first paper, we examined Anticipatory News Infrastructures. Our newest paper, Making Events explained how anticipatory infrastructures can create shared senses of time.
• I worked on an NSF-funded project to examine the development of ethical practices in the computer security research community  with my collaborators Katie Shilton (co-PI), Quinn DuPont, and Justin Petelka (PhD Candidate, UW). We examined the ethical work of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. We have written an accessible overview of our work in CACM, a magazine for computer scientists and tech professionals and published a few papers on pedagogy and contributed to the Online Ethics Center.
• I worked on a transnational comparative investigation of how the data policies influence personal data access in Seattle, Bangalore, and London. With my venerable associates Janaki Srinivasan, Elisa Oreglia, and  Justin Petelka, we published a paper about the process of requesting data from major corporations in the US, UK, and India. We have a book chapter coming out about what we called “trickledown GDPR” — the idea that people who use services operating in the EU under GDPR also got some of the rights that EU citizens got without actually having those rights.
• Daniela Rosner and I ran yearlong research and reading group called “Troubled Worlds” where we interrogated computing in the Anthropocene from the perspective of our fields of informatics and design.
• Along with Scott Miles, I organized a project about seismic cultures around the Pacific Rim that resulted in a workshop and a Seattle Design Festival booth.
• I was the co-leader with Sarah Quinn and Margaret O’Mara of the UW chapter of the Scholar Strategy Network, an organization that connects researchers to a broader community of journalists, politicians, and organizers.