Kate Williams (PhD Michigan).  

I am an associate professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and I also teach on occasion in China.

My research asks this: Is community possible in the digital age? I follow in the footsteps of the early urban sociologists, who debated whether community was possible in the industrial age. Part of this question is: What is the role of the public library in this process?  And how do ordinary people get and give tech help?

These helpseeking "informatics moments," as I call them, are the building block of humanity's move into digital society.  I find that people are more ingenious and resourceful than they get credit for.  Professional librarians who understand this make for better and freer libraries.  I'm currenting looking at this process in a breakthrough 1980s Chicago branch library, a modern-day senior housing complex, and (collaborating with more than a dozen other scholars) in the US, China, Korea, Australia, the UK, and Norway).

My last book is a departure from the digital age.  It tells the story of an abolitionist village established in 1836: New Philadelphia, by Gerald A. McWorter and Kate Williams-McWorter for the New Philadelphia Association.  Available at http://newphiladelphiail.org.

Speaking conceptually, my scholarship makes use of five interrelated ideas: community, social capital, public computing, cyberpower, and the informatics moment.  By focusing on community and social capital, I have clarified how community technology adoption and transformation rely primarily on forces within that community, even in underresourced communities. By examining public computing—public places where people learn and use computers—I have demonstrated the usefulness of these spaces for local community members and explained how they function. By applying the concept of cyberpower to the study of communities, I have focused attention on the results for communities that use information technology rather than on technology itself as a social intervention. And by identifying the informatics moment, I have shifted attention from the structural deficit model implied in the otherwise valuable concept “digital divide” to a process model of self-reliant community transformation.

http://go.illinois.edu/katewill
katewill@illinois.edu