US Library of Congress Research Position for Professor Dame Wendy Hall

Dame Wendy Hall, Professor of Computer Science within Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, has arrived at The John W. Kluge Center at the US Library of Congress as the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society. Her tenure began on 24th March and she will be in residence there for three months.

At the Kluge Center, Dame Wendy will research a project titled, “Internet Histories and Futures.” She states that she will use the Library’s collections to explore the economic, social, and technical dimensions that have contributed to the development of the Web as a “socio-technical system".

Before her return to Southampton this summer, Dame Wendy will lead a public symposium on 16th looking at how libraries, governments and institutions could preserve and archive the contents of the World Wide Web. She will also co-host a two-day “Hackathon” featuring 20-30 invited participants who will look to develop new open-source tools and approaches for working with large data sets.

The Kluge Chair in Technology and Society is a distinguished senior research position in residence at the Library. Its holder, appointed by the Librarian of Congress, conducts research focusing on the impact of fast-changing technology on human societies, using the rapidly growing digital online resources of the Library, in addition to science and technology reports and documentation worldwide.

A Dame Commander of the British Empire and elected Fellow of the Royal Society, Dame Wendy’s work has been at the forefront of computer science, multimedia and hypermedia, the Semantic Web and digital libraries for more than 30 years. She is a member of the Web and Internet Science research group in ECS and is Director of the University’s Web Science Institute.