Team

Investigators

Heather Ford is Head of Discipline for Digital and Social Media in the School of Communications at UTS. She has a background working for global technology corporations and non-profits in the US, UK, South Africa and Kenya. A former Google Policy Fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, former Executive Director of iCommons and co-founder of Creative Commons South Africa, her research focuses on the social implications of media technologies and the ways in which they might be better designed to prevent misinformation, social exclusion, and algorithmic bias. She is the author of Writing the revolution: Wikipedia and the survival of facts in the digital age (MIT Press, 2022).

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Tamson Pietsch is Associate Professor in Social and Political Sciences and Director of the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS. Her research focuses on the history of ideas and the global politics of knowledge, with a particular focus on universities and other institutions of knowledge. Tamson is the author of The Floating University: Experience, Empire and the Politics of Knowledge (Chicago, 2023) and Empire of Scholars: universities networks and the British academic world, 1850-1939 (Manchester, 2013). She is currently researching the representation of historical events on Wikipedia, and writing about expertise in interwar Australia. Tamson received her DPhil from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She has held academic posts at the Universities of Oxford and Sydney and Brunel Univeristy London.

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Nathaniel Tkacz is Reader in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Warwick, which he joined in 2012 after completing a PhD in Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His work often focuses on the cultural, political, economic and organisational dimensions of technology, with a specific focus on networked and digital forms. He has authored or edited 5 books, including Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness (University of Chicago Press, 2015). His recent book is Being with Data: The Dashboarding of Everyday Life (Polity Press, 2022). His recent work is on phone apps, interfaces, data formats, and media and economy.

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Michael Falk is Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is a computational literary scholar, with interests in AI, text analysis, the history of the disciplines and the literature of the Long Eighteenth Century. His monograph, Romanticism and the Contingent Self (Palgrave, 2024), uses text anlaysis to rethink the representation of subjectivity in Romantic literature from across the Anglophone world. He is the maintainer of the wikkitidy R package.

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Technical Research Assistant

Kelly Tall holds a Master of Data Science and Innovation from UTS. She currently works at Commonwealth Bank of Australia as Senior Manager – Data Visualisation, and sits on the committee of Wikimedia Australia. She helps organisations and researchers tell great stories with their data. She has deep experience in all the diverse elements that go into creating great data visualisation; UX and UI, data science, stakeholder management and facilitation, front-end development and design.  

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Researcher

Francesca Sidoti is a cultural studies and cultural geography scholar, who specialises in place-oriented, qualitative research across academic and applied settings. She submitted her PhD at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, in 2023. She is particularly interested in how places shape and enduringly affect people’s experience, including how this manifests in the digital space. Francesca has worked as a research consultant since 2017 and led and managed projects for government agencies, NGOs, and universities.

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Timothy Koskie is a researcher of online media and media pluralism at UTS, with a recent focus on generative AI. His current projects include Valuing News and Wikihistories Discovery projects and the Implications of Generative AI for knowledge integrity on Wikipedia. In his doctoral degree, investigating news comments’ potential as a component of media pluralism, and has two master’s degrees in media research. He has taught undergraduate and postgraduate seminars and tutorials in multiple fields across media, internet governance, and digital cultures at UTS and the University of Sydney. In addition, he has nearly two decades of experience in publishing and education and has taught in and conducted courses on media and communication skills across 14 years in the US, Australia, Spain, and South Korea.

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