I finished my Ph.D. in December 2022 and am currently on parental leave. I am applying for postdoc positions. I am open to being contacted about research opportunities in industry and academia.
I work to defamiliarize and reimagine web search. I have a Ph.D. in Information Science from the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. I use interviews and digital ethnography to research conceptions of search engines, web search practices, and their entanglement with societal values. I study search counter-imaginaries: how we talk about, imagine, know, build, and practice different ways of searching.
As Noble (2018, p. 181-182) writes:
Indeed, we can and should imagine search with a variety of other possibilities. [ . . .] Such imaginings are helpful in an effort to denaturalize and reconceptualize how information could be provided to the public vis-à-vis the search engine. [emphases added]
Updates!
- 2022-12-16: 📁 Filed my dissertation: Griffin D. (2022) Situating Web Searching in Data Engineering: Admissions, Extensions, Repairs, and Ownership. Ph.D. dissertation. Advisors: Deirdre K. Mulligan and Steven Weber. University of California, Berkeley. 2022. [griffin2022situating]
- 2022-11-25: 📄 My paper with Emma Lurie (equally co-authored) was published: Griffin, D., & Lurie, E. (2022). Search quality complaints and imaginary repair: Control in articulations of Google Search. New Media & Society, Ahead of Print. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221136505 [griffin2022search]
- 2022-10-17: 🎉 My paper with Emma Lurie was accepted at New Media & Society (initially presented at a Data & Society workshop in early 2022: The Social Life of Algorithmic Harms)
- 2022-09-29: 📄 My paper with Jake Goldenfein was published: Goldenfein, J. & Griffin, D. (2022). Google Scholar – Platforming the scholarly economy. Internet Policy Review, 11(3). https://doi.org/10.14763/2022.3.1671 [goldenfein2022platforming]