Dr. Katrin Glinka
Cultural Studies & HCI & Design
I am passionate about culture and digital technologies. My expertise lies in bringing both areas together in a meaningful way. In recent years, I have especially worked on applying visualisation techniques to cultural data and on exploring interaction concepts in the context of digital research approaches in the humanities and museum interpretation.
My work is guided by the conviction that digital technologies offer the potential to re-think and re-configure research and practices in the humanities and in cultural institutions, allow us to implement critical and interventionist approaches, and strengthen visitor orientation and accessibility in museums. I believe in the value of collaboration and enjoy working with colleagues from different disciplines, which regularly challenges me to explore new practices and methods. The strongest influences on my academic and applied work have come from fields such as design, human-centred computing, and critical cartography.
My dissertation »Festgeschrieben - Cultural-technical manifestations of museum collection orders and transformative effects of digital technologies« is concerned with the institutionalised form of collecting in European museums. I analyse the effects of digital socio-technical systems in museum collection documentation, especially regarding knowledge representation. For this, I combine a theoretical approach grounded in cultural studies with a practice-oriented perspective informed by critical museology, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and visualisation research. Conclusively, I address the question of whether and in what way digital socio-technical systems and algorithmic processes can amplify or trigger »transformative impulses« in the context of museum collecting.
In June 2024 I joined the Ada Lovelace Center for Digital Humanities at Freie Universität Berlin where I am responsible for the scientific coordination and act as head of the administrative office of the center. From November 2020 until May 2024, I worked at the Human-Centered Computing Research Group at Freie Universität Berlin as head of the HCC Data Lab. As the scientific lead for the project museum4punkt0 (2017 - 2020) at the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, I developed and evaluated various digital applications for museums. Before that, I was a research associate at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, where I continued to teach media and design theory until spring 2020.