Faculty Expertise:
Education:
BA, Stanford University
MS (Information Management and Systems), University of California at Berkeley
PhD (Information Science), University of Washington
Biography:
Dr. Melanie Feinberg, an associate professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), is a classificationist whose research approach combines design with the humanities. Her work focuses on learning how to read and write databases to complement our engineering and mining of them. She received her PhD in 2008 from the iSchool at the University of Washington; she has a master’s from the iSchool at Berkeley (2004) and was an undergraduate at Stanford (1992). In her professional career before returning to academia, she was a content strategist and technical editor, working at companies such as Apple Computer, Scient, and PeopleSoft.
Awards and Recognition:
2018 - Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship
2018 - UNC Institute of Arts and Humanities Faculty Fellowship
2014 - Best paper honorable mention award (top 5% of 2,064 submissions). M. Feinberg, D. Carter, and J. Bullard. Always somewhere, never there: using critical design to understand database interactions. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems—CHI 2014, 1941–1950.
2012 - Journal of Documentation highly commended paper. M. Feinberg. How information systems communicate as documents: the concept of authorial voice. Journal of Documentation 67(6), 1015–1037.
Courses Recently Taught:
INLS 201: Foundations of Information Science
INLS 520: Organizing Information
INLS 728: Seminar in Knowledge Organization
INLS 720: Metadata Architectures
INLS 722: Introduction to Metadata Architectures
Selected Publications and Presentations:
2020. M. Feinberg, W. Sutherland, M. Jarrahi, S. B. Nelson, and A. Rajasekar. The new reality of replicability: the role of data work in scientific research. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4 (CSCW1): Article 35 (May 2020).
2019. A. Gursoy, K. Wickett, and M. Feinberg. Understanding change in a dynamic, complex digital object: reading categories of change out of patch note documents. iConference 2019. Finalist for Lee Dirks Best Paper Award.
2018. M. Feinberg. Wolfgang Iser and the reader as creator. In Critical Theory and Interaction Design, edited by J. Bardzell, S. Bardzell, and M. Blythe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
2018. M. Feinberg. Factotem: what is information access for? Cataloging and Classification Quarterly 56(8): 665-682. (festschrift for Allyson Carlyle).
2018. D. Maron and M. Feinberg. What does it mean to adopt a metadata standard? A case study of Omeka and the Dublin Core. Journal of Documentation 74(4): 674-691.
2017. M. Feinberg, D. Carter, J. Bullard, and A. Gursoy. Translating texture: design as integration. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems—DIS 2017.
2017. M Feinberg. A design perspective on data. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems—CHI 2017.
2017. M. Feinberg. Material vision. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing 2017 (CSCW 2017)
2017. M Feinberg. Reading databases: slow information interactions beyond the retrieval paradigm. Journal of Documentation 73(2), 336-356.
