Brooke Coco presents research in USA and visits partner organisation Cornell Tech
Author ADM+S Centre
Date 12 January 2026
ADM+S PhD student Brooke Coco from RMIT has recently returned from a research trip to the USA, where she met with ADM+S Partner Organisation Cornell Tech.
In New York, Brooke visited the Digital Life Initiative (DLI) research lab at Cornell Tech. While at the Roosevelt Island campus, she met with doctoral and postdoctoral fellows and attended a DLI Working Group meeting.
“Student groups shared progress on a range of projects, including experiments with automated purchasing agents designed to locate and buy items online, as well as the development of digital tools aimed at promoting healthier lifestyles,” said Brooke.
While in New York, Brooke also met with colleagues from Metagov, the primary field site of her PhD research. Metagov is an open, online collective committed to cultivating tools, practices and communities that enable self-governance in the digital age. Brooke’s ethnographic research within Metagov contributes to the co-development of the Knowledge Organisation Infrastructure (KOI), a sociotechnical system designed to enhance the coordination, sustainability, and discoverability of shared knowledge.
“This trip marked my first in-person meeting with the KOI project manager and only my second with the community manager.”
Brooke then travelled to New Orleans to attend the 2025 American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Meeting. Over the course of the conference, she attended a range of panels and workshops, including “Selling In, Selling Up, Selling Out and Shutting Up:” Examining These Myths via the Lived Experience of Business Anthropologists, where practitioners reflected on common critiques of business anthropology through their own industry experiences.
Brooke presented twice over the course of the meeting, firstly delivering a short flash presentation on her ethnographic research into the development and implementation of KOI
Speaking to the conference theme of Ghosts, Brooke explored how contemporary data infrastructures are haunted by the epistemic assumptions of their designers, by the data they privilege or ignore, and by the practices they render invisible.
“I discussed how KOI is creating the capacity to confront these ghosts by offering affordances that empower local communities with greater collective control over how their knowledge is curated, managed, and shared.”
“In doing so, it invites us to reimagine data infrastructures not as haunted, but as living systems that remember, respond to, and evolve with the communities they serve.” Brooke stated.
Brooke was a panellist in a roundtable discussion titled Ghosts in the Machine: Reanimating Anthropological Engagement with AI, which explored anthropology’s historical role in shaping AI. Together with other researchers engaging with AI, they discussed how the discipline might re-engage with AI in more practice-oriented ways to support the development of more situated and ethical systems.
During the roundtable, Brooke highlighted her current use of Telescope, a participatory digital ethnography tool co-developed by ADM+S Associate Investigator and Metagov Research Director Professor Ellie Rennie.
“Telescope addresses key challenges associated with ethnographic research in digital environments, by enabling researchers and community members to collaboratively flag forum posts relevant to ongoing research, which then trigger an automated, consent-based data collection workflow.”
Brooke discussed the team’s plans to reintegrate these enriched artefacts back into Metagov’s knowledge base, where they may seed new research, insights, and workflows.
Brooke highlighted a number of promising collaboration pathways after conversations with fellow panellists. For example, following the roundtable Brooke was invited to take part in a workshop on AI agents to be held at Monash University in 2026.
Brooke Coco’s research trip activities were supported by ADM+S HDR Funding, ADM+S RMIT Node funding and the RMIT School of Media and Communication.
