Featured Member
- iSchools News
- Aug 26
- 3 min read
Issue #5
Colin Rhinesmith
North American Region USA
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
School of Information Science
iSchools member since 2003
Hello Colin! Please tell us a bit about you and your iSchool!
I am Associate Professor and Director of the Digital Equity Action Research (DEAR) Lab in the iSchool at Illinois. In the iSchool, our research is focused on addressing local and global challenges at the intersection of people, information, and technology. Our school’s history is rooted in library science dating back to 1893, and we have since evolved to incorporate the information sciences through a broad multidisciplinary approach, including the humanities and social sciences. We offer both undergraduate and graduate programs in the information sciences, including a focus on data science at the undergraduate level and library and information science, information management, and bioinformatics at the graduate level. Our PhD in Information Science attracts students from around the world to work with our faculty in a variety of fields. Our faculty also collaborate with other researchers at other institutions, including at other iSchools, across the globe.
Your Research focuses on “Community informatics, critical information studies, digital equity, engaged scholarship, infrastructure studies, participatory research, and information policy” - how did you come to this field of research?
I first started working in community informatics as a practitioner. I was Community Media and Technology Manager at Cambridge Community Television in Massachusetts where I ran our ComputerCENTRAL public computing lab and managed our NeighborMedia citizen journalism program. Both initiatives worked to help people, who did not have access to computers and the internet at home, tell their stories using networked information technologies. It was here, and through my graduate studies at Emerson College in Boston, that I first learned the importance of digital inclusion and community informatics as a subdiscipline of information science focused at the intersection of digital equity research and practice. Today, I lead the DEAR Lab which uses participatory research approaches to address issues related to technology and social inequities.
In 2024, you and your international colleagues founded an iSchools Community on the topic of “Community Informatics”. What prompted you to take this step and how did it work out?
I have to credit my colleague, Khalid Hossain who is Research Fellow in the Department of Human Centred Computing at Monash University for introducing us to the idea. I had known Khalid from my time with the Community Informatics Research Network (CIRN) led by researchers at Monash University since the early 2000s. Because our iSchool has been deeply involved in community informatics since the 1990s, I was fortunate to have been part of what I would call a “second generation” of researchers dating back to my time as a doctoral student at the iSchool at Illinois. After some conversation with Khalid, Martin Wolske, Larry Stillman, Misita Anwar, Ricardo Gomez, and others in iSchools across the globe, we decided to learn more about this wonderful opportunity that the iSchools organization provides to start a Community Informatics iSchools Community.
Leading an international community is not easy! What do you think are important points in order not to lose sight of each other as a research community?
This is a wonderful question. I always have to thank those who came before me in this space, mainly Martin Wolske, Larry Stillman, and other researchers at Monash University, University of Illinois, University of Washington, and at other iSchools who were responsible for keeping this small, but mighty community of community informatics together. The annual CIRN Conference at the Monash Prato Centre in Italy, the CIRN listserv, which the University of Illinois now hosts, and The Journal of Community Informatics, where I am Co-Editor-in-Chief with Khalid and our colleague, Peter Johnson (University of Waterloo) have provided additional venues to keep our research community actively engaged. We are also fortunate to have a dedicated and passionate group of researchers and practitioners who care deeply about community and the ways in which technology can play a supporting role in advancing community-defined development goals.
If you could give just one advice to future information scientists, what would it be?
Be a bridge and be open to other people and perspectives across our broad multidisciplinary field. Our world is full of complex problems, and information scientists are uniquely positioned to solve them because of the ways in which we are able to work across boundaries. These are valuable aspects of our profession that we should embrace, not ignore.
Thank you very much, Colin!
Featured Members is a new iSchools Feature series spotlighting members of iSchools who are part of the development and organization of thought provoking projects or conferences. Please contact admin@ischools-inc.org in case you would like to be featured as well.
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