DrKieran Hegarty

I am a social scientist whose research focuses on the definition, construction, and interpretation of born-digital heritage: software, digital files, web pages, social media, and other forms of expression that exist only in digital form.

I am trained in sociology and library & information science and use concepts and methods from science & technology studies and critical information studies to ask sociological and political questions about digital heritage:

• Who (or what) decides what counts as 'heritage' in an age of digital networks?
• What sociotechnical systems support that process and what values, biases, and assumptions do they contain?
• What forms of knowledge does contemporary heritage enable or foreclose?

My PhD (RMIT University, 2024) examined these questions through an ethnographic and historical study of the Australian Web Archive, one of the largest and oldest collections of archived web material in the world. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research at the National Library of Australia and several Australian state libraries, I explored how the expansion of the web, the rise of commercial social media platforms, and processes of automation are reshaping collecting across Australia's major public libraries and what this means for the production and distribution of "comprehensive" and "representative" public library collections.

From 2023 to 2026, I was a Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making at RMIT, where I was involved in major national projects examining the social geography of internet access and use across Australia. This involved working with remote First Nations communities, women in rural Victoria, and regional communities to understand how social and material conditions shape differences and inequalities in how the internet and digital technologies are experienced across Australia.

From 2026 to 2029, I am a Deakin University Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Humanities & Social Sciences, leading a project called Connecting Australians with their digital heritage. Working closely with libraries, museums, and diverse communities, the project is developing new ways to interpret Australia's born-digital heritage collections by developing and testing participatory methods.

I have published in New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, the International Journal of Cultural Policy, and other academic journals, and have written for The Conversation and Inside Story. I was awarded the biennial Early Career Research Award by the journal Internet Histories in 2022 and was a 2022 Digital Humanism Junior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. My first book, a sole-authored monograph, is forthcoming in Routledge's Studies in Archives series.

In recognition of my work with national and state libraries and the wider community of librarians and archivists, I received a 2023 RMIT Prize for Research Engagement and Impact. I continue this work through my appointment on the Research Advisory Committee of the Australian Library & Information Association.