Phil Howard INFORMATION · TECHNOLOGY · SOCIETY

World Information Access Project

The mission of the World Information Access Project was to present data on the unequal distribution of technology access, skills, and capacity between and within countries around the world.

A significant amount of the research we did was either original or combined existing data in original ways. The project was active 2002-2012, involved dozens of undergraduates in original research, had multiple funders and several kinds of research outputs and impacts.

Project Team

Laura Busch

Successfully defended her project in Spring 2014.We have collaborated on several projects, including a dataset of gini coefficients for technology access (now available from the ICPSR) and a paper about indexing global technology diffusion that we published in The Information Society. She now has a post-doc at UW.

Tabitha Hart

Now an Assistant Professor at San Jose State University. I served on her committee, and we collaborated on a feminist ethnography of how poor women in developing countries encounter new digital technologies, a project that involved extended fieldwork for Tabitha in India.

Daniel Kreiss

Defended in 2010, is now an associate professor in Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. We have several papers together, including a policy paper on privacy norms in four advanced democracies and an article on the data mining industry that supported Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.

Nimah Mazaheri

Defended winter 2010, is now an assistant professor in political science at Tufts University. We wrote a paper in the prominent journal World Development about what kinds of telecommunications policy reforms actually have an impact on technology access.

Laura Hosman

Had a prominent post-doc at Berkeley and is now an assistant professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. We have a policy paper together on how different reform strategies have had different outcomes in the countries of the former Yugoslavia.

Funded by

Institutional Affiliations

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Democracy
Technology and Society
Public Policy
Research Methods
International Affairs