Anabel completed her PhD in the Faculty of Information Studies in June 2004. She has taken a positon asAssistant Prof. of Media & Information Studies and Sociology at the University of Western Ontario.
Profile:
[KMDiary 3.11. November 2002]
Even as enrollment figures climbed, KMDI faculty realized that a number of doctoral students, being post-course and so beyond the purview of the Collaborative Program, were carrying out research clearly in line with the interests of KMDI and the field of study. The KMDI Graduate Fellowship initiative, designed to address this discrepancy, was the brainchild of Barry Wellman, the Program Committee Rep for Sociology. When he dreamed it up he may have had Anabel Quan-Haase in mind.
An independent search committee recognized in her Fellowship application the model student they were seeking: a senior doctoral candidate with a distinguished record of scholarship and collaboration in knowledge media. People who have worked with Anabel comment on her smart, positive energy and her path-breaking intellect. With an extensive list of publications and conference presentations (she is one of the few students who can go to scholarly conferences on her own and give bravura performances), international recognition and invitations to collaborate abroad (several months at the Information Centre Research Institute in Bonn, Germany, and two months in Japan with the NIT Communications Research Laboratory and the University of Kyoto's Department of Communication Science), Anabel has already acquired career-making cachet.
Although based in the Faculty of Information Science, Anabel's activities cross departmental lines. A research assistant with Barry Wellman, she has principal responsibility for the statistical (SPSS-based) analysis of a National Geographic Society web survey on Internet use. Besides meeting the challenge of a huge sample size (40,000), she proposed, designed and implemented a series of new, more powerful measures for studying the Internet applications of social capital (interpersonal relationships, civic involvement, and community sentiments). Anabel's contribution, which Wellman, a world leader in the field, considers outstanding, is showcased in a chapter for The Internet in Everyday Life (Blackwell; in press). Appearing in print for the first time last year, her work has already been discussed and cited in publications such as the New York Times. This sort of currency is the mark of distinction rather than fashion, as scholars and policy-makers scramble to assess the impact, for good or ill, of the Internet on community building. Bucking pop-psych intuition and the unguarded counsel of dystopians, Anabel feels the Internet enhances community and connectivity because such contact is added on to other forms of contact between friends and relatives near and far. The ability of administrators and policy-makers to benefit from these findings may depend on a more finely grained resolution (analyzing Internet use by user characteristics such as gender, socio-economic status and location comprises Anabel's follow-up investigation), but a clearer picture has already emerged.
And thats just a side bar. Her major research, a multi-disciplinary dissertation conducted under the aegis of FIS, Sociology and The McLuhan Program, probes the boundaries between social systems and technological artifacts by examining how two groups working in an Internet-based company in the service sector use different media to acquire and diffuse information. The study focuses on how individuals fulfill their roles as information brokers by accessing information outside the group and disseminating it within. To fulfill the role of information brokers, employees use a vast array of technologies; to chart this activity Anabel must assimilate factors of cognition, organizational problem-solving, social network analysis, and computer mediated communication. Not surprisingly, the project has attracted the attention of private sector partners. IBM's Institute of Knowledge Management is collaborating on the research design, Mitel Networks is providing computer-based personalized software to test, and two major corporations have volunteered to become test sites.
Such high-powered buy-in is liable to go to any student's head, but when asked to account for her accomplishments, Anabel, who can be unassuming in English, Spanish and German, is quick to deflect praise. Sharing successes and acknowledging her larger research community, she displays that sort of artless charm that often plays its own part in turning co-workers into collaborators. |
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