Research Buzz in Science and Technology Studies

People typically think that as a Research Librarian, most of my time is spent supporting students and faculty with their own research projects and proposals. However, librarians often have research interests of their own. Library and information science is both a professional and academic area that covers multidisciplinary subjects such as computer and data science, education, history, artificial intelligence, organizational management, and media studies.

This past October, I participated in two international conferences in the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and internet research.

The first took place in Toronto on October 7-10 and was organized by the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S). Alongside Dan Woulfin, a librarian based across the street in Butler Library, I presented research into early online chess tournaments and how we can use this history to reconfigure our contemporary ideas about AI, hybrid intelligence, and human-computer interaction. The panel was entitled Techno-Magical Futures & Histories. Here is more information via our abstract:

• Hearing computers "whisper": Centaurs, online chess, and animistic design in the mid-2000s

Centaur chess, a variation of chess in which teams consult computer chess engines, is invoked today when describing upskilling through human/AI collaborations. The game is an example of techgnosis (Davis, 1998), where technology is understood through mystical and magical tropes. The centaur is mythologized by the story of ZackS, a team of two novice chess players and three consumer-grade computers that won the first centaur tournament by defeating grandmasters and the supercomputer Hydra. However, the words of the ZackS and others depict a much less coherent moment in which centaur play produced multiple and unstable results.

Through reporting and interviews on chessbase.com from the 2000s, this paper argues that human–machine interaction during this period was through negotiated, animistic engagement between humans and computer software. Because computational capabilities were starting to surpass human abilities in chess, centaur players conjured and navigated chess engines, communing with their’ “personalities” through a process of animistic design (Marenko & van Allen, 2016) to create techno-magical assemblages and strategies. For instance, tournament participants harnessed and interpreted the engines’ uncanny advice, describing it as “whisper[ing] cunning moves in your ear”. Notably, they also often succeeded by knowing when to ignore the engines and how to transcend the software's limits.

By returning to these early centaur chess players, especially their preparation, rituals, and moments of failure, we show that embedded in today's magical and mythical claims of black box generative AI is a clearer historic discourse around explainable technology and human interpretation.

The second conference had a lot of overlap with 4S; I even met multiple people who, like me, were attending both conferences back-to-back. This conference took place on October 14-17 in the amazing Mexico City and was organized by AoIR, the Association of Internet Researchers. The theme of the conference was “Regenerations,” which raised big questions about renewal, decay, and the (im)permanence of technology, infrastructure, and online culture. I presented research into the presence of bots on Reddit and the communities' efforts to organize around the work of bot detection. I am grateful for the support of TC professor Dr. Ioana Literat, in whose class I first pursued this topic. This presentation took place as part of a panel on Trust, Identity, and Moral Judgement in AI. Please find more information on my presentation below.

• “A Human Behind It Somewhere:” Negotiating Trust And Authenticity When Abandoning The Commons

In recent years, Reddit has become a primary source for AI scraping and GenAI-driven social bots. Now, the platform’s foundational philosophy of “remember the human” is facing an existential crisis. This study addresses the urgent need to understand how grassroots communities respond to the breakdown of trust and the perceived failure of platform governance in the wake of sophisticated automation. Through thematic discourse analysis of the community r/RedditBotHunters between January 2024 and November 2025, this research identifies three critical shifts in the digital landscape. First, users have adopted a logic of digital vigilantism, employing militaristic rhetoric to self-police what they view as a “plagued” and “abandoned commons”. Second, the study reveals the rise of the “entangled agent,” where the distinction between human and machine is blurred by dynamic “cyborg” accounts and “body snatchers” (hijacked human profiles), rendering authentication methods ineffective. Finally, a profound trust deficit emerges as users perceive Reddit prioritizing commercial data-mining and AI licensing agreements over user safety. An atmosphere of surveillance fosters paranoia and self-censorship, where users are disciplining their online behavior to prevent their data from being captured by the very AI crawlers they aim to detect. The findings suggest that the perceived abandonment of the commons is actually a process of “digital enclosure,” where human-generated conversation is harvested to train human-mimiking systems that threaten the platform’s authenticity. This research documents an evolving “platform spirit,” arguing that users are adapting to a new platform geography alongside the loss of community control.

I also participated in a pre-conference workshop that was closely aligned with my work as a librarian here at Gottesman Libraries: "Researching Search: Conceptual and Methodological Approaches To The Study of Online Search Practices and Systems." During this workshop, we analyzed the role of search engines beyond simple information retrieval. We explored the diverse tactics people actually use to find information, how search engines shape our everyday habits, what insight can be gained into the power these tools hold, and what other ways the practices of “searching” are embedded in our lives in ways we may not be totally aware of. 

I am grateful I was able to take the time to conduct this research and present it among my peers of technology and information scholars. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you would like to learn more or just chat about the internet as a rich domain of knowledge and qualitative inquiry (ak3588).