Jane Fountain.
Miree Byun, Jane Fountain.
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Digital domain
Jane Fountain drives the intersection of technology, institutions and government.
Sitting at a side table in her compact corner office on the fourth floor of Thompson Hall, Jane Fountain is surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with every subject from political science to engineering, from music to history. Maybe even a volume or two on sports. The variety reflects the multidisciplinary approach to teaching and research on which Fountain thrives and that brought her to UMass Amherst in September after nearly two decades on the faculty at Harvard.
Fountain, a professor of Political Science and Public Policy, brought with her The National Center for Digital Government, which works to discover how people are using the Internet and related technology in organizations and institutions and particularly in government. “We created the center to bring social science methodology to understanding how technology and government intersect,” Fountain explains. “People had already figured out how to apply the ‘next big killer app’ to things like online entertainment and shopping” and, as a natural result, business models were established in those areas. But the ways in which the Internet was being used to change lives by governments around the world or by large organizations was scarcely being examined, and certainly not with the discipline of trained social scientists.
What particularly attracted her to Amherst was the combination of a core liberal arts-based curriculum working in concert with a myriad of specialized research centers, for example the Center for Information Technology Knowledge and Dispute Resolution that studies how the Internet can be used as tool in solving conflicts online and in the real world. This can include anything from working with online legal services to studying how the public Web encyclopedia Wikipedia settles arguments between its editors.
She noticed that students here have many opportunities to study at these crucial intersections of knowledge. She was particularly impressed with UMass Amherst’s Information Technology minor, now in its third year. This program lets undergraduates in any major build a minor around technology, shaped to fit their specific majors. A business student, for example, might study current legal and ethical issues in cyberlaw or an English major might be drawn to
CompLit 236 - Digital Culture.“The opportunities here are tremendous,” Fountain exclaims. “Many universities would like to build an IT minor. UMass has done it.”
That Jane Fountain would value undergraduate education drawing on many disciplines is no surprise. A violinist, she earned her undergraduate degree in music as a scholarship student at the Boston Conservatory, before moving on to public policy and political science study in graduate school at Harvard and then Yale.
In addition to heading up the National Center, Fountain also leads the new Science, Technology, and Society Initiative. It’s drawing connections between issues in science and technology and those in public policy and social sciences. And as if that weren’t enough, she also directs the Women in the Information Age Project, also housed on campus, examining the role of women in computing and information technology-related fields.
Fountain’s work has, understandably, gained her a wide following. When she’s not writing and speaking at conferences around the world, she can be found mentoring a select group of visiting research fellows that follow her to Amherst like a Pied Piper of the digital age.
One of this year’s fellows is Miree Byun, a sociology professor with the Seoul Development Institute in South Korea. She met Fountain at an international conference and has come to campus to further her research on the effect of the Korean government’s investment in providing computers and Internet access to its citizens and, particularly how that has changed the lives of Korean women. During a meeting in Thompson Hall, Byun explains that five years ago there was a tremendous gender gap in Korea: men had access to computers and to the Internet. Women did not. Then the government started a program to give computers to people, including stay-at-home mothers and housewives who could use the computers not only to gain computer literacy but also to earn an income without leaving home. The result, Byun found, is that not only does Korea now have one of the highest saturation rates of Internet usage in the world – over 90% of Koreans have access to the Internet – but Korean housewives are now able to use computers to contribute to their family income without leaving home.
When Byun is asked why she came to Amherst to work with Jane Fountain, she says with a tone of surprise at even being asked: “Well, of course, everyone knows her!” although there’s obviously more to it than that. There’s a recognition that the work done here, particularly the interdisciplinary research and the opportunities it presents for students, is known far beyond Amherst.
more: National Center for Digital Government
Science, Technology, and Society InitiativeWomen in the Information Age