Contact
arayburn@umich.edu
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Hello!
I'm a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information. I conduct qualitative research on topics related to computing in museums and knowledge infrastructures. Specifically, I study the data practices and associated maintenance of these digital systems.
I received my Masters of Science and Information from the University of Michigan in 2020, along with a graduate certificate in Museum Studies. My Bachelor degree is from Michigan State University in Arts and Humanities. Prior to grad school I worked in cultural heritage museum collections, including the Michigan State University Museum assisting with their Quilt Index Project.
My interests include gardening, spending time outside with my dog, and crafting textiles.
Here is my CV (last updated May 2025).
News
May 2025
I am thrilled to announce in Fall 2025 I will be joining the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Communication and Information as an Assistant Professor.
I defended my dissertation!
Recently I wrapped up a Doctoral Intern Fellowship with Deep Blue Repositories at the U-M Library. I developed reparative description guidelines and a remediation strategy for the institutional repository to implement. Thinking through questions of metadata harm and repair in a self-deposit repository was interesting, and something we hope other institutional repositories find useful. Check back soon for a copy of our guidelines!
November 2024:
New book chapter with Andrea Thomer discussing the role of paradata in natural history data migrations.
I received a dissertation fellowship from the Museum Studies program here at Michigan.
Last month I presented early dissertation findings at Museum Computer Network. It was great being able to bring findings back to a community that has been so helpful in shaping this project.
June 2024:
New paper with Sony Prosper, Yvette Ramirez, and Ricky Punzalan sharing an assessment framework for memory institutions who are considering publishing digital projects that contain Indigenous cultural heritage material.
February 2024: New paper in Archival Science with Andrea Thomer and Ricky Punzalan. In this text we examine the socio-technical frictions that showed up for the Great Lakes Research Alliance (GRASAC) during their recent data migration. We unpack the notion of systemic friction, or the continual challenges of pushing back against colonial legacies in museum collections.
May 2023: New paper in ST&HV with Andrea Thomer. We explore how practitioners in museums and archive collections are maintaining their digital systems, highlighting database work as a craft.
April 2023: I participated in the AI & Archives Symposium hosted by the Sussex Humanities Lab. My talk, titled, Innovative tech and invisible labor: lessons from early museum computing, discussed the gendered histories of museum computing work.
February 2022: My poster with Andrea Thomer, "The craft of database curation: Taking cues from quiltmaking," won the best poster award at iConference!
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