Bonnie Mak has been named visiting senior fellow at the Center for Humanities and Information (CHI), a newly-formed collaboration at Pennsylvania State University between the university’s College of the Liberal Arts and the University Libraries.
Mak joins faculty and graduate students from Penn State as well as two postdoctoral fellows to form CHI’s inaugural class of scholars for the academic year 2015-2016. While in residence, she will work on her own research projects and contribute to the intellectual community of the Center.
“I am thrilled to join the Center for Humanities and Information and help showcase how it is through humanistic inquiry that we may come to grips with the most pressing questions regarding data, information, and the future of a civil society,” said Mak. “Penn State is offering a tremendous opportunity to change the way that we think and talk about information, and I look forward to sharing my research with national, international, and cross-disciplinary audiences.”
At CHI, Mak will continue her work employing the techniques of the humanities—medieval studies in particular—to explore questions of knowledge-production, information transfer, and their technologies. Expanding upon her earlier work on the archaeology of digitizations, she will develop a second book-length project, Confessions of a 21st-Century Memsahib, which examines the social processes and dynamics that underpin the manufacture of data. Mak will also pursue her collaboration with graphic designers and librarians in, Designing an Argument: A Collaboration in Scholarly Publication, which tests the boundaries of scholarly publication by articulating a complex humanistic argument in the language of scientific diagrams.
Mak is an associate professor at the University of Illinois, and holds a joint appointment in the Graduate School for Library and Information Science and the Program in Medieval Studies. Her research interests include manuscript, print, and digital cultures; the cultural production and circulation of knowledge; manuscript studies; book history; medieval and early modern collecting; and the history of archives and libraries. Her first book, How the Page Matters, was published in 2011. Mak currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), the organizing committee of the International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (I-CHORA), and is coeditor of the online project for book history, Architectures of the Book.