Katie Gach is a digital ethnographer studying human experiences on social platforms. For her dissertation, she is researching how people manage post-mortem social media data. Her work has directly influenced changes to Facebook's memorialization options, and has examined how people respond to celebrity deaths. Katie earned a master's degree in Communication, Culture, and Technology at Georgetown University in 2015, and a Bachelor of Arts in cultural anthropology at Kansas State University in 2009. Her advisor is Jed Brubaker, an assistant professor in the Information Science Department.
For more information about Katie, view her LinkedIn page. Students' personal pages are rarely updated after graduation.
Publications:
Katie Z. Gach and Jed R. Brubaker. 2020. Experiences of Trust in Postmortem Profile Management. Trans. Soc. Comput. 3, 1, Article 2 (February 2020), 26 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3365525
Katie Z. Gach, Casey Fiesler, and Jed R. Brubaker. 2017. “Control your emotions, Potter”: An Analysis of Grief Policing on Facebook in Response to Celebrity Death. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 1, CSCW, Article 47, 18 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3134682 (December 2017).
