Her research interests include the dynamics and structures of collaboration, and privacy and gender in sociotechnical environments. Kisselburgh has a background in human performance and computer science, and brings over twenty years professional experience designing and supporting learning environments in academic settings, including 35 computing labs and 2 academic buildings. She is currently co-PI on two active NSF projects, including a Cyberlearning project to develop collaborative design environments for engineers, and an Ethics in Science and Engineering project to develop online course modules to develop moral reasoning abilities in engineers. Her research has
Palantir is one of the most secretive technology firms in the US. The company supplies information technology (IT) solutions to governments, nonprofits, and corporations, focusing on data integration and surveillance services. To investigate Palantir’s opaque technology practices, this article presents findings from a topic modeling of Palantir patents (n=155) filed from 2006-2019 in the US, Germany, Australia, UK, and EU. This approach follows recent literature that uses patents as data for researching opaque IT firms. We begin by summarizing scholarship on Palantir and IT for policing, intelligence, and security. Our findings show that Palantir’s IT produces infrastructural layers of meaning/context via metadata that are wrapped ‘on top’ of previously held legacy data. We thus use the concept of infrastructuring to understand Palantir’s practices, where information standards like metadata are theorized as phenomena for structuring social worlds. The paper ends by offering action items for future research into opaque IT firms.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.