Biography
Philip Doty is Associate Professor Emeritus at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. He retired in September 2022, having served on the faculty for 30 years, including 9 as Associate Dean and 7 as Graduate Advisor. He was also a founding faculty member of the Technology and Information Policy Institute, serving as an Associate Director from 1997-2021, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at UT. He has also been a visiting faculty member at the iSchools at Syracuse University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.His research, teaching, and consulting have focused on information policy, particularly the nexus of surveillance, privacy, copyright, and digital information technologies. Additional areas of expertise are surveillance and security affairs, the empirical study of information behavior and practices, policy analysis as a research technique, gender and IT, computer networks, philosophy, and research methods.
Doty has consulted with some 30 external clients: U.S. federal agencies; state agencies in New York, Texas, and Virginia; public and private universities; and legislative and executive branch agencies in the U.S. and elsewhere, e.g., Mexico, Colombia, France, and Japan.
He has directly supervised 63 graduate student’s research as: dissertation advisor for 10 iSchool PhD students; a member of the dissertation committees of 19 other UT PhD students at the iSchool, the departments of Radio-TV-Film and Journalism in the Moody College of Communication, and the department of English in the College of Liberal Arts; advisor of eight iSchool MS theses and four MS reports; supervised eight LBJ School of Public Affairs master’s reports; and member of 11 other master’s thesis and report committees at the iSchool, Moody College of Communication, and the College of Liberal Arts. Doty has also supervised several dozen individual study courses with iSchool MS and PhD students and co-published the results of some of that work with those students and been a faculty expert for eight senior thesis projects at St. Edward’s University in Austin.
Besides teaching with colleagues in the UT iSchool, he has co-taught courses with faculty and staff colleagues at UT in the LBJ School of Public Affairs, several departments in the Moody College of Communication, the Cockrell School of Engineering, the College of Liberal Arts, the College of Natural Sciences, the UT System Office of Legal Affairs, and the UT-Austin and UT System Office of Telecommunications.
Degrees
PhD, 1995, Syracuse University, School of Information StudiesMLS, 1988, Syracuse University, School of Information Studies
BA (English), 1971, Le Moyne College
Areas Of Specialization
Culture Gender and Information Technology
Information Ethics
Privacy
Research Methods
Science and Technology Studies
Philosophy and Information Studies
Copyright
Surveillance
Information Policy
Government Secrecy
Internet Studies
National Information
Infrastructure
Recent Publications
Kravchenko, Elizaveta (Lee), & Doty, Philip. (Under review). Questioning empathy as care in human-computer interaction design. (5000 words)
Doty, Philip, & Aspray, William. (In press). Writing law and public policy into computing and information history. In William Aspray (Ed.), Writing computing and information history: Approaches, reflections, and connections. Rowman & Littlefield. (9500 words)
Aspray, William, & Doty, Philip. (2023). Does technology really outpace policy, and does it matter? A primer for technical experts and others. Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 74(8), 885-904. Featured cover paper. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24762
Doty, Philip, & Kravchenko, Elizaveta. (2022). Ethics of care and students stigmatization by learning analytics. The 18th Annual Social Informatics Research Symposium and the 4th Annual Information Ethics and Policy Symposium. Annual Conference of the Association for Information Science & Technology 2022. Best paper award. Pittsburgh, PA. (13 pp.)
Doty, Philip, & Aspray, William. (2021). Mythic infallibility of the dogs nose: Unreliable information in the U.S. judicial system. LIBRES, 31(2), 78-103. https://doi.org/10.32655/LIBRES.2021.2.1
Floegel, Diana, & Doty, Philip. (2021). The library/surveillance interface. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Association for Information Science & Technology 2021, 169-178. Second place winner, best long paper of the conference. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.444
Doty, Philip. (2021). Privacy, surveillance, and the smart home. In Melissa Ocepek & William Aspray (Eds.), Deciding where to live: Information studies on where to live in America (pp. 93-123). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Doty, Philip. (2020). Oxymorons of privacy and surveillance in smart homes. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Association for Information Science & Technology 2020;57:e222. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.222 (11 pp.).
Doty, Philip. (2020). Learning from fictional characters: An information behavior perspective. Canadian Association for Information Science 2020 Annual Conference. https://www.cais2020.ca/talk/fiction-characters/CAIS2020_paper43_Doty.pdf (6 pp.).
Doty, Philip. (2020, July). Library analytics as moral dilemmas for academic librarians. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 46(4), 102141 (15 pp.). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2020.102141
Doty, Philip, & Broussard, Ramona. (2017). Fiction as informative and its implications for information science theory. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 54(1), 61-70. Crystal City, VA. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.2017.14505401008
Davidson, Mark, & Doty, Philip. (2017). Someone to watch over me: Spotify and the ethics of music discovery. Annual Information Ethics Round Table, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (8 pp.).
Broussard, Ramona, & Doty, Philip. (2016). Toward an understanding of fiction and information behavior. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 53(1), 1-10. Copenhagen, Denmark. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.2016.14505301066
Doty, Philip. (2015). U.S. Homeland Security and risk assessment. Government Information Quarterly. 32(3), 342-352. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2015.04.008
Doty, Philip. (2015). Ethics, risk, and U.S. government secrecy. Journal of Information Ethics. 24(1), 11-47. Featured paper. https://web-s-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=4b175358-c095-441e-af2e-77a61a4538e9%40redis
Presentation: 2021 - Preparing a U.S. Federal Case Brief. With Margaret Zimmerman et al. Panel presentation on Pedagogical Practices for Information Policy Instruction. Virtual ALISE Conference, September. (90-minute program)
Presentation: 2021 - Deciding Where to Live: Information Studies on Where to Live in America, A Discussion. With Melissa Ocepek, Steve Sawyer, Jamillah R. Gabriel, David Hopping, & Judith Pintar . iConference, March, virtual conference. (90-minute program)
Presentation: 2020 - Teaching Policy Thinking. Undergraduate Informatics Education 2020. Public Interest Technology-University Network. March 4, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.
Recent Awards
- Appointment as Associate Professor Emeritus, School of Information, University of Texas at Austin
- Distinguished Member, one of 28 inductees in its first class, Association for Information Science & Technology
- Featured cover paper, Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 74(8), 885-904: “Does technology really outpace policy, and does it matter? A primer for technical experts and others.” With William Aspray
- Best paper award, 18th Annual Social Informatics Research Symposium and the 4th Annual Information Ethics and Policy Symposium: Resilient Sociotechnical Systems for Social Good at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology: “Ethics of
- Second place winner, best long paper, Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 169-178: “The library/surveillance interface.” With Diana Floegel
- Dean's Research Assignment, School of Information, University of Texas at Austin
- Featured Paper, Journal of Information Ethics. 24(1), 11-47: Ethics, risk, and U.S. government secrecy.