Melanie Feinberg

Degrees:

Melanie has a BA with Honors in Humanities from Stanford University, a MIMS (Master's of Information Management and Systems) from the University of California at Berkeley, and a PhD in Information Science from the University of Washington.

Bio:

Melanie is a classificationist: her research interests center on the theory, design, and evaluation of systems for organizing information. Such /organizational schemes/ provide a structure through which both physical objects, such as printed documents, items in a museum, or the animal kingdom, and intellectual objects, such as ideas or concepts, are described, grouped, and related. Organizational schemes take various names and forms, including taxonomies, ontologies, metadata schemas, and information architectures. Melanie's work involves investigating the conceptual basis of such schemes and using that conceptual understanding to propose new design possibilities, new work processes, and new criteria for evaluation.

Before commencing her graduate education, Melanie worked in the field of technical communication, holding positions as a writer, editor, and content strategist at such companies as Apple Computer, IDG Books Worldwide, Scient, and PeopleSoft.