Featured Member
- iSchools News
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Issue #12
Allan Martell
North American Region
USA
Indiana University Bloomington
Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering
iSchool is member since 2003
Hello Allan! Please tell us a bit about you!
I’m an assistant professor at the Department of Information and Library Science at Indiana University Bloomington. I’m 41 years old. I was born and raised in El Salvador, Central America. I came to the United States for the first time in 2010. I returned to El Salvador in 2012-2014, then returned to the United States. I’ve pretty much lived here ever since.
My research centers on the role of information curation in shaping social memories of violence. I take a wide-ranging approach to my understanding of violence. As an object of analysis, violence can be discrete historical events and structural phenomena. Historical episodes of violence include genocides or authoritarian regimes, whereas structural violence pertains more to long-lasting, and often ongoing, discrimination against marginalized communities and other forms of social exclusion, like racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
You studied Social Communications at the Central American University in El Salvador in your BA and Digital Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US for your Master, which both have not so many connections to (digital) memory collection. How did you come up with your research topic for your PhD at the iSchool at the University of Michigan?
Much of what we do in digital media and information science is tied to issues of identity, community, and belonging. Social memory is integral to people’s social identity. After all, what is social memory if not the story that we tell ourselves about who we are and where we come from through, among other things, expressive media?
The field of digital media is interested in expressing meaning through computational systems. These expressions aim to reflect our identity, including our origins as individuals and as a society. Just as paintings of Napoleon on top of a white horse tell a particular story about his epic rise to power, Gonzalo Frasca’s classic game, September 12, tells a story about the war on terror.
Information science stems from the confluence of multiple disciplines, including library science, archival science, informatics, and computer science, among others. Many of these disciplines have decades-long traditions of memory-centered research. Archival scholars have been concerned with the link between archives and social memory for at least four decades. Archives play a role not just in preserving social memory, but in providing means to rediscover “dormant” memories. Archival records can be used to challenge or sustain dominant narratives of the past, and their power is heavily dependent on how archival records are mobilized. The most classic example is the Shoah Foundation, which started off preserving oral history records about the Holocaust.
In museum studies, there is also a community concerned with the roles of memorial museums. These museums focus on the material cultures surrounding historical and structural violence. One classic example is the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C.
Finally, from the decades-long tradition in social computing, an emerging group of researchers has spent the past decade designing and deploying computer systems to study their impact on family memories of the everyday and the colonial past of the West. Anyone interested should check the works of Jasmine Jones, Rachel Charlotte Smith, and Asnath Paula Kambunga.
You received your PhD in 2020 and started your career as a postdoctoral researcher at the Louisiana State University before joining the faculty of the Indiana University in Bloomington in 2022. What brought you to Bloomington? Can you tell us a bit about your iSchool?
Getting to my current position at IU was a three-year journey. I began applying for tenure-track jobs as soon as I began writing my doctoral dissertation and continued during my time at LSU. In my last year as a postdoctoral researcher, I received a couple of job offers, one of them at IU Bloomington. I chose the latter because I liked the welcoming environment of my faculty colleagues, I love college towns, and I found that IU offered me the tools I needed to focus on my research agenda: research funds, enough flexibility to focus on my research, and plenty of opportunities around campus to support my grant writing, paper writing, and instructional needs.
The Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering comprises four departments: Intelligent Systems and Engineering (ISE), Informatics, Computer Science (CS), and Information and Library Science (ILS). Many faculty members, including myself, are engaged in international collaborations with other academic institutions around the world. Partly thanks to those relationships, our school offers study abroad programs. In recent years, faculty-coordinated student delegations have traveled to Ghana, Seoul, and the United Kingdom. The largest degree by enrollment at Luddy is the master’s in data science, a two-year graduate program that trains data analysts. In the ILS department, we offer three degrees, the largest of which is the Master's in Library Science.
In 2025 you applied successfully for the iSchools Research Grant. Can you tell us a bit more about your project?
Of course! Our project is titled “Remembering the Climate Crisis: Community Memory and Future Aspirations in Climate-Related Urban Contexts.” Our project originates from a repeated observation in studies of climate change communication: there is an abundance of authoritative information about anthropogenic climate change. Ironically, in the age of post-truth, when people struggle to agree even on what fundamental reality is, many still doubt that climate change is real or that something should be done about it. People are more likely to become more concerned about climate change when related information connects with their present concerns, aspirations for the future, and community belonging. Moreover, people who belong to social circles where others expect everyone to be informed about climate change are more likely to seek climate-change information. Interestingly, we know little about how such individuals make sense of the information they consume. Social memories of climate change help connect these factors.
Recent work in memory studies has shown that some communities are actively thinking about the evolution of climate change and how it impacts them. In narrating climate change, individuals draw on culturally available frames, such as moral decline, divine will, environmental mismanagement, or political neglect, to shape events into coherent plots with identifiable agents and consequences. For example, a case study about memories from a 2014 fire in Sweden demonstrated that the social memory about this incident strengthened residents’ sense of community through common sensemaking and reinforcing a durable post-disaster identity. In other words, social memory functions as a cognitive and emotional coping tool for communities impacted by climate change. Social memory allows vulnerable communities to reinterpret present risks through the lens of shared past experiences. However, little is known about whether and how social memories of climate change influence climate action.
The “Remembering the climate crisis” project aims to better understand the interconnection of climate-related social memory, community identity, community concerns and aspirations, and climate action. We want to know how communities living in climate-affected urban settings remember and narrate the impacts of climate change on their lives, the roles of such memories in community members’ sense of agency, belonging, and aspirations for the future, and whether and how social memory contributes to urban community’s climate resilience and adaptive strategies. We plan to conduct focus groups with environmental activists and residents of neighborhoods impacted by climate change in two locations: Indianapolis, in the United States, and Dhakar, in Bangladesh.
You are also a member of the Climate Action Coalition - an iSchools Community group. Can you tell us a bit more about what your group is researching?
The Climate Action Coalition is broadly concerned with promoting interdisciplinary and intersectional collaborations that are impactful and leverage the potency of information towards climate action.
In recent years, we have explored issues such as digital literacy, inclusive systems design, and sovereign information solutions. Some of our members published a case study about the information needs of a fisher community in Bangladesh. During the iConference 2026 we held two events, a workshop and a panel. Our workshop explored how information literacy shapes people’s attitudes and behaviors towards climate change and educational interventions to increase critical climate literacy, or the ability to find and critically assess climate-change information. In addition, our panel presented results from a project about digital sovereignty with regard to climate change solutions. This project was a collaboration with indigenous communities in Indonesia and Bangladesh. Later this year, at the 2026 annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), some of our members will hold a workshop on how to explore people’s perceptions of climate-related information through storytelling.
If you could give just one advice to future information scientists, what would it be?
The most impactful research projects come from interdisciplinary work. Your ability to identify connections between seemingly disconnected fields may yield tremendous value. While finding these connections can yield a certain degree of intellectual enjoyment, what is really at stake is solving real world-problems by thinking outside the box. This type of thinking requires not only collaborating across disciplines but also becoming conversant in them.
Thank you very much, Allan!
Interested in hearing more about Allan's Research?
Join us for the first iSchools Community Keynote
on 19 May at 1pm (London time).
Featured Members is an 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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