Christopher Kelty

Professor

Christopher M. Kelty is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has a joint appointment in the Institute for Society and Genetics, the department of Information Studies and the Department of Anthropology. His research focuses on the cultural significance of information technology, especially in science and engineering. He is the author most recently of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke University Press, 2008), as well as numerous articles on open source and free software, including its impact on education, nanotechnology, the life sciences, and issues of peer review and research process in the sciences and in the humanities.

He is trained in science studies (history and anthropology) and has also written about methodological issues facing anthropology today.

Departments

Department of Information Studies

Expertise

Internet Culture

Titles and Positions

Professor

Education

Ph.D. Program in Science, Technology and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2000)

Select Publications

Christopher M. Kelty Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software and the Internet Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
Kelty, C. (2014). The fog of freedom. In Gillespie, T., Foot, K., and Boczkowski, P., editors, Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Currie, M., Kelty, C., and Murillo, L. F. R. (2013). “Free software trajectories: From organized publics to
formal social enterprises?” Journal of Peer Production, 1(3).
Kelty, C. M. (2013b). “There is no free software.” Journal of Peer Production, 1(3).
Kelty, C. (2012b). From participation to power. In Delwiche, A. and Henderson, J., editors, The Participatory
Cultures Handbook. Routledge, New York and London.
Kelty, Christopher M. (2012). “This is not an article: Model organism newsletters and the question of ‘open science.‘” Biosocieties 7(2):140-168. (pdf)
Fish, A., Murillo, L. F. R., Nguyen, L., Panofsky, A. & Kelty, C. M. (2011). Birds of the Internet: Towards a field guide to the organization and governance of participation. Journal of Cultural Economy, 4(2), 157-187. doi:10.1080/17530350.2011.563069. [PDF]
Christopher M. Kelty “Afterword:: Recompiling,” Criticism 53(3):471-480, Summer 2011 (Edited by Antonio Cerasa and Jeff Pruchnic).
Christopher M. Kelty “Logical Instruments: Regular Expressions, Artificial Intelligence, and Thinking about thinking,” in The Search for a Theory of Cognition: Early Mechanisms and New Ideas, ed. Stefano Franchi and Francesco Bianchini, Amsterdam, New York:Rodopi Publishers, (2011).
Christopher M. Kelty “Introduction: Culture In, Culture Out,” Anthropological Quarterly 83, no. 1 (2010): 7-16.