At the Social Media Collective, I assisted Nancy Baym, Tarleton Gillespie, and Mary Gray on their research projects. Topics included AI ethics, the politics of social media platforms, histories of voice assistants, how metrics are used in cultural industries, and the future of work. I co-authored an academic article on making sense of metrics in the music industries and two conference papers on working from home during COVID-19: one on managing boundaries while working from home and one on parallel chat in meetings.
Before the SMC, I worked as a research assistant to Jonathan Sterne from 2017-2019. I copy edited manuscripts, did bibliographic research for grant applications, and conducted literature reviews for Professor Sterne’s books, articles, and other projects. I’ve worked on a project about audio mastering startups and the politics of automating musical judgement. Most of my work included reading and analyzing literature across the history of science and technology, science and technology studies, queer and disability studies, cultural studies, and critical algorithm studies, as well as more technical fields like audio engineering journals and computer science conference proceedings.
As an undergraduate at McGill, I worked in Ian Gold’s Neurophilosophy Lab. I helped design and run a mixed-methods experiment exploring the relationships among Internet usage, city living, social support, and discrimination as they relate to mental health. In addition to collecting quantitative data through questionnaires, I facilitated semi-structured interviews with young people about their experiences of social support and discrimination, online and offline.
In summer 2015 I worked as a research intern at the Embodied Cognition Group at Universität Potsdam in Germany. I researched scientific developments in embodied cognition, data visualization, and applied cognitive psychology to help improve graph readability in digital data visualizations. I designed and programmed an experiment to measure how label orientations and placements affected the speed of comprehension and memorability of data visualizations.
Rachel Bergmann 