Hannah Cohoon

I study change in scientific practice to understand how knowledge infrastructures are enacted.

After earning my bachelors in Cognitive Science at the University of Virginia, I began work at the Center for Open Science (COS). There, while working on the Reproducibility Project: Psychology, I became curious about how technology and academic culture affect scientists' work. From there, I moved on to the PhD program at UT Austin's School of Information under the mentorship of James Howison. Given this interdisciplinary home, my research is influenced by a variety of fields interested in socio-technical issues (i.e. STS, HCI, organization studies, CSCW). Methodologically, I am trained and have experience in experimental design and survey research. My recent work, however, has primarily employed qualitative methods like interviews, content analysis, and grounded theory coding.

I remain interested in open science as an example of ongoing change in science and plan to continue studying trends in academic research. In my work I examine how knowledge and research products move and change between minds, labs, hard drives, and journals as well as how those moves might recursively shape (structurate) the knowledge and products themselves. This is the work of studying knowledge infrastructures. If scientific research is meant to be a paragon of trustworthiness and unbiased reporting, I ask: What do stakeholders do to pursue that goal? Is there agreement about what science is meant to be? How do technology and culture affect research outcomes?

Outside of professional life, I am a craft dilettante, single-speed cyclist, and patio gardener. My husband, Chris, and I live with our dog, Zula, and cat, Fred, in an increasingly plant filled home in Austin, TX. Always on the lookout for elevation change, I love to travel to find a good trail to explore or mountain to climb.

I usually go by Hannah (a nickname given to me by my palindrome loving father). But, my legal and publishing name is Johanna Cohoon.

• I'm looking forward to being a keynote speaker for the DOE sponsored Workshop on the Science of Scientific-Software Development and Use this December
• My co-authors and I received best applied paper runner-up at CIKM 2021 for our work on software citation. Congratulations team!
• October 2021: I participated in the ASIST doctoral colloquium in Salt Lake City and the CSCW doctoral colloquium online. It was so nice to meet new people and hear how other students are addressing issues in their research.
• Early 2021 update: Two papers I co-authored were recently accepted. Congrats to all collaborators on "The Role of Values and Cyberinfrastructure in Open Science" (Information and Culture) and "Softcite-dataset: A dataset of software mentions in scientific publications" (JASIST)!
• 9-13 November 2019: I attended CSCW 2019 and participated in the "Mapping the How of Collaborative Action" workshop.
• 4 September 2019: I presented "Open Science as a Value-Driven, Cyberinfrastructure Supported Ethos" (Cohoon & Howison, 2019) at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)