Jennifer Volk is studying towards a PhD, exploring the tensions between library collections as data, the Gen AI industry, the LLM data supply chain and the cultural heritage sector more widely. Her work crosses the borders between AI ethics and cultural heritage, and aligns with both the “Humanities Informatics” and “Creativity, Data and AI” themes in the Design Informatics research portfolio.

She has worked as a Research Assistant on the ekip project, researching AI scraping and its impacts on cultural heritage and the digital commons. This project was a collaboration between Design Informatics and SPS, as well as a large number of EU-based institutions.

Jennifer is funded through a SGSAH Collaborative Doctoral Award. This means that alongside Design Informatics at University of Edinburgh, where she is supervised by Prof. Melissa Terras, she is part of University of Glasgow Information Studies, supervised by Prof. Paul Gooding, and the National Library of Scotland, supervised by Dr. Sarah Ames and Dr. Patrick Hart.

Before returning to academia for this PhD, she worked for many years as a database engineer across corporate, 3rd sector and HE sectors in Germany and Scotland.