Short presentation

Katie Mackinnon is a postdoc on the research project Data Loss: The Politics of Disappearance, Destruction and Dispossession in Digital Societies (DALOSS) (PI: Nanna Bonde Thylstrup). She researches web archives, internet histories, and social media platforms, and engages with critical feminist ethics of care methodologies for web archival research while exploring social, infrastructural, and policy issues of the internet.

Katie’s PhD is from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. Her dissertation, Databound: Histories of Growing up on the World Wide Web, looks to the Canadian context to examine digital traces and data afterlives of young people’s online participation in the 1990s-2000s. Her work engages with ageing web materials and argues that data is inextricably attached to people, both in the ways that it represents them and in the ways that they desire and deserve meaningful control over it.

She was previously a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow with the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI) at the University of Toronto. 

Her research has been published in Internet Histories, Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, and Studies in Social Justice.