Faculty
Alison Langmead
Clinical Associate Professor and Director, Visual Media Workshop; Associate Professor, School of Information Sciences
Constellation(s): Contemporaneity, Mobility/Exchange, Visual Knowledge
Alison Langmead holds a joint faculty appointment between the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. This dual role allows her to combine her enthusiasm for academic work with her equally strong drive to use theoretical research in daily practice.
For the Department of Art History and Architecture, Alison serves as the Director of the Visual Media Workshop (VMW). The mission of the VMW is to develop and encourage the creation of innovative methods for producing, disseminating and preserving the multimedia presentation of academic work. To achieve these objectives, she directs a technologically-focused environment of collaboration and creativity where the University community can gather to create, share and preserve the visual presentation of their academic work.
For the School of Information Sciences, Alison serves as a faculty member within the Archives and Information Sciences track of the Library and Information Sciences program. In her academic research, she works on teasing out the nature of the relationship between the practice of active information management and the archival profession, both as a historical narrative and as a complex, changing process in contemporary America. This research, plus all of the theories, concepts and models that she teaches at SIS, are put into daily practice in her work at the VMW.
Alison is also a principal contact for the DHRX: Digital Humanities Research at Pitt initiative, which represents a transdisciplinary network of scholars here at the University of Pittsburgh who use digital methods to study the ways in which humans interact with their environments, whether social or cultural, natural or human-created.
Education
PhD, Columbia University
MLIS, University of California at Los Angeles
Recent Presentations
“Developing a Collaborative Pedagogy in the Digital Humanities.” Paper presented with Aaron Brenner, Matt Burton, and Aisling Quigley at the 2015 Keystone Digital Humanities Conference, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 2015.
“Sustaining MedArt: Assessing the Persistence and Longevity of a Pioneering Digital Humanities Project.” Poster presentation with Aisling Quigley, iConference 2015, Newport Beach, California, March 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/73731.
“Managing Research Data: Challenges and Opportunities.” Invited panel presentation at University Senate Plenary, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 2014.
“Curatorial Practice as Production of Visual and Spatial Knowledge.” Invited panel presentation at the "Debating Visual Knowledge" Conference, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 2014.
"Data Visualization as a Model for Engaged Practice.” Invited talk presented at the “Big Data in Libraries” conference, Western New York Library Resources Council, Syracuse, New York, April 2014.
“Data Visualization, the Digital Humanities, and the Job of an Archivist.” Paper presented at the 2013 Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, Erie, Pennsylvania, April 2013.
“Hiring New PhDs as Archives Faculty in North America: A Preliminary Assessment.” Paper presented at the 2012 Archival Education and Research Institute, University of California at Los Angeles, July 2012.
“Librarians, Filers or Archivists?: The Construction of the American Records Management Profession.” Paper presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists, Chicago, Illinois, August 2011.
Recent Academic Products
Itinera. Web resource found at http://itinera.pitt.edu. Technical Director and Project Manager, 2012-present.
Constellations. Web resource found at http://constellations.pitt.edu. Designer, Information Architect, Implementation Lead, 2013-present.
“The History of Archival Education in America: What's Next?” In Proceedings of the 2014 Archival Education and Research Institute, edited by Richard J. Cox, Alison Langmead, and Nora Mattern (Sacramento: Litwin Books, forthcoming 2015).
Scalissi, Nicole, et al. “Curatorial Practice as Production of Visual & Spatial Knowledge: Panel Discussion, October 4, 2014.” Contemporaneity 4 (2015): 143-157. http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/contemporaneity/article/view/151.
Owens, Trevor. “Historicizing the Digital for Digital Preservation Education: An Interview with Alison Langmead and Brian Beaton.” The Signal: Digital Preservation (Library of Congress), May 6, 2013. http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2013/05/historicizing-the-digital-for-digital-preservation-education-an-interview-with-alison-langmead-and-brian-beaton/.
