danah boyd

Boyd grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Altoona, Pennsylvania.[9] According to her website, she was born Danah Michele Mattas.[10]

After her parents' divorce, in 1982, she moved to York, Pennsylvania, with her mother and her brother. Her mother married again during danah's third grade and the family moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

She attended Manheim Township High School from 1992–1996. She used online discussions forums to escape from high school. She called Lancaster a "religious and conservative" city. Having had online discussions on the topic, she began to identify as queer.[11] A few years later, her brother taught her how to use IRC and Usenet. Even though she thought computers were "lame" at the time, the possibilities for connecting with others intrigued her. She became an avid participant on Usenet and IRC in her junior year in high school, spending a lot of time browsing, creating content, and conversing with strangers.[12] Though active in many extra-curricular activities and excelling academically, boyd had a difficult time socially in high school. She assigns "her survival to her mother, the Internet, and a classmate whose misogynistic comments inspired her to excel."[12]

Once she reached college, she chose to take her maternal grandfather's name, Boyd, as her own last name. She decided to spell her name in lowercase so as "to reflect my mother's original balancing and to satisfy my own political irritation at the importance of capitalization."[9][10]

Her initial ambition was to become an astronaut but after an injury, she became more interested in the Internet.[9]

danah boyd in 2005, a speaker at Digital Identity conference in Chicago.

boyd initially studied computer science at Brown University, where she worked with Andries van Dam and wrote an undergraduate thesis about how "3-D computer systems used cues that were inherently sexist."[13] She pursued her master's degree in sociable media with Judith Donath at the MIT Media Lab. She worked for the New York-based activist organization V-Day, first as a volunteer (starting in 2004) and then as paid staff (2007–2009). She eventually moved to San Francisco, where she met the individuals involved in creating the new Friendster service. She documented what she was observing via her blog, and this grew into a career.[14]

In 2008, boyd earned a Ph.D. at the UC Berkeley School of Information,[15] advised by Peter Lyman (1940–2007) and Mizuko Ito. Her dissertation, Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics, focused on the use of large social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace by U.S. teenagers,[16] and was blogged on Boing Boing.[17][18]

During the 2006–07 academic year, boyd was a fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California. She was a long-time fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, where she co-directed the Internet Safety Technical Task Force,[19] and then served on the Youth and Media Policy Working Group.[20]

Visualization from one of boyd's lectures by Willow Brugh

While in graduate school, she was involved with a three-year ethnographic project funded by the MacArthur Foundation and led by Mimi Ito; the project examined youths' use of technologies through interviews, focus groups, observations, and document analysis.[21][22] Her publications included an article in the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning, Identity Volume called "Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life."[23] The article focuses on social networks' implications for youth identity. The project culminated with a co-authored book "Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media."[24]

She published untraditional research on youth using Facebook and MySpace in 2007. She demonstrated that most young users of Facebook were white and middle-to-upper class, while MySpace users tended to be lower-class black teenagers. Her work is often translated and relayed to major media.[11] In addition to blogging on her own site, she addresses issues of youth and technology use on the DMLcentral blog. Boyd has written academic papers and op-ed pieces on online culture.[25]

Her career as a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center started in 2007. In January 2009, boyd joined Microsoft Research New England, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a Social Media Researcher.[26]

In 2013, boyd founded Data & Society Research Institute to address the social, technical, ethical, legal and policy issues that are emerging from data-centric technological development.

She was interviewed in the 2015 web documentary about internet privacy, Do Not Track.[27]

Currently, boyd is president of Data & Society,[28] a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and a Visiting Professor at New York University. She also serves on the board of directors of Crisis Text Line (since 2012),[29] as a Trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian, on the board of the Social Science Research Council, and on the advisory board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). Boyd is currently focused on research questions related to "big data" and AI, bias and manipulation of data, and how technology shapes inequality.

danah boyd giving a keynote at ROFLcon at MIT in 2010

In 2009 Fast Company named boyd one of the most influential women in technology.[33] In May 2010, she received the Award for Public Sociology from the American Sociological Association's Communication and Information Technologies section.[34] Also in 2010, Fortune named her the smartest academic in the technology field[35] and "the reigning expert on how young people use the Internet."[36] In 2010, boyd was included on the TR35 list of top innovators under the age of 35.[37] She was a 2011 Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. Foreign Policy named boyd one of its 2012 Top 100 Global Thinkers "for showing us that Big Data isn't necessarily better data".[38]

On Sept 12, boyd received the EFF 2019 Barlow/Pioneer Award,[39] and gave a keynote[40] highlighting women's situation in the tech industry and specifically the current controversies involving MIT Media Lab.

Boyd has spoken at many academic conferences, including SIGIR, SIGGRAPH, CHI, Etechm Personal Democracy Forum, Strata Data and the AAAS annual meeting. She gave the keynote addresses at SXSWi 2010 and WWW 2010, discussing privacy, publicity and big data.[41][42][43] She also appeared in the 2008 PBS Frontline documentary Growing Up Online, providing commentary on youth and technology.[44] In 2015, she was a speaker at Everett Parker Lecture.[45] In 2017, boyd gave a keynote titled “Your Data is Being Manipulated” at the 2017 Strata Data Conference, presented by O’Reilly and Cloudera, in New York City.[46] In March 2018, she gave a provocative keynote titled "What Hath We Wrought?" at SXSW EDU 2018[47] and another keynote titled “Hacking Big Data” at the University of Texas at Austin, discussing data-driven and algorithmic systems.[48] In November 2018, she was featured among "America's Top 50 Women In Tech" by Forbes.[49] In September 2019, she was awarded the EFF Pioneer Award.[50]

Boyd has stated she has an "attraction to people of different genders," and identifies as queer. On her website, boyd notes that she attributes her "comfortableness with [her] sexuality to the long nights in high school discussing the topic in IRC." [51] She is married and has three children. [52]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to danah boyd.

• Data & Society Research Institute webpage
• A Discussion with danah boyd, Ibiblio Speaker Series, 2006
• An interview with danah boyd, Women of Web 2.0 Show, 2008
• danah boyd Interview at YouTube
• Friending Your Child by Lawrence Goodman, Brown Alumni Magazine, 2012