Victoria Munn and Erin Griffey spoke to us about beauty culture, representation and systems of knowledge. While the stories they told about culture were important, I was fascinated by how they were empowered in their research through the technology they had. Databases enabled them to categorise, track, develop, and search their information with ease.
While these are mostly menial tasks, they would take up the majority of researchers’ time if they had to be done 100% manually or with physical copies.
How much further can we take the role of technology in research? While the processing speed of computers is much faster than our ability to scan or move information, it isn’t much more complex – however with the increasing accessibility of artificial intelligence it is very possible for researchers to train computers to sort unlabelled information based on content. This type of machine learning can be applied to many data-types from images and video to audio or text.
These are existing technologies that are becoming more accessible to all people, as this happens I wonder what the role of the researcher will transform to – will we simply outline the information we want studied and plug-in databases of knowledge? Will these tools remove the role of assistant, making the transition to academic research a solo mission? The long term effects of technology in academia are hard to predict, but will certainly be very powerful… for someone.
