About
Megan Sapnar Ankerson's research and teaching interests involve new media and visual culture, web history, software studies, memory, time, and media aesthetics. She is the author of Dot-com Design: The Rise of a Usable, Social, Commercial Web (New York University Press, 2018). Her current research project is called Big Data Time Machines: AI, Sci-Fi, and the Future of History, which historicizes large-scale massively distribributed computational systems and neural networks alongside shifting narrative conventions and political concerns of popular time travel media over the course of sixty years (1964-2024). How do we make sense of these massively distributed computational systems as time machines? How are these systems transforming the daily experience of being digital? And how can we better understand what Big Data Time Machines—and the high-res histories they promise—mean for new user experiences of the past, present and future? This project investigates the world of Big Data Time Machines as material-semiotic systems that reconfigure the temporal infrastructures of everyday life. The broader aim of the book involves exploring how the critical entanglement of science and humanities can help us gain new critical purchase on complex and seemingly intractable problems of our times.
Field(s) of Study
- New and Emerging Media
- Web History
- Visual Culture
- Memory and time
- Feminist technoscience studies
