Kieran Hegarty

PhD Members

Kieran Hegarty is a librarian and sociologist. He is a PhD candidate in Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University, where he works on the ARC Linkage project Representing Multicultural Australia in National and State Libraries. Kieran’s research considers how the web has changed how Australia’s national and state libraries build collections and how they are used. He is particularly interested in how techniques used to collect websites and social media data are changing the nature of curation and heritage, and the questions these changes raise about the politics, ethics, and future of Australia’s cultural record. Kieran is also a 2022 Digital Humanism Junior Visiting Fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, where he is pursuing a project that explores the ethical implications of archiving the digital traces of individuals and communities. You can find out more about Kieran’s research at his website (assemblingtheweb.com).