Isabelle Langrock, Ph.D.

Isabelle Langrock studies the ways that knowledge is produced, contested, and structured in digital systems. She applies computational methods to understanding how activist efforts work to produce more equitable information resources.

An upcoming graduate at the Annenberg School for Communication, Isabelle Langrock researches how open technologies often remain closed to many populations and how activist groups work to create more equitable systems. She draws from digital inequality, information environment, and social movement literature to investigate the value of openness. Langrock’s first peer-reviewed article, published in the Journal of Communication, studied feminist activism on Wikipedia and through an analysis of over 11,000 Wikipedia biographies,  their success at bridging the content gender gap. Reflecting her commitment to public scholarship, this research is now the base for a new training module by one of the feminist groups (Art+Feminism).  Her dissertation project continues this work of examining gender gaps on Wikipedia and extends it to other knowledge systems of Open Source Software and Open Science.

Prior to Annenberg, Langrock spent several years on the staff of Girls Who Code, a nonprofit confronting the gender gap in the tech sector by teaching girls and young women computer science. She received her B.A. in the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science and Medicine (HiPSS) from the University of Chicago.