Yuwei Lin
Yuwei Lin, Taiwanese, is Lecturer in Future Media in the School of Media, Music and Performance at the University of Salford in Manchester, UK.
She received her BA in Economics and a Diploma in women’s and gender studies from the National Taiwan University in 1999. Afterwards, she worked for one year as a full-time research assistant in environmental economics at the National Taiwan University for the research project "Environmental Economic Indexes for a Sustainable Taiwan - Vision and Strategy" funded by the Taiwan National Science Research Council.
In October 2000, she joined Science and Technology Studies Unit (SATSU) at the Department of Sociology at the University of York and started her PhD research. Under the supervision of Professor Andrew Webster, her doctoral thesis, entitled “Hacking Practices and Software Development: A Social Worlds Analysis of ICT Innovation and the Role of Open Source Software", completed in December 2004, analyses the socio-technical relationships between diverse actors involved in innovation processes of ‘free/libre open source software’ (FLOSS). Her research contributes to our understanding of "hacker culture" that she defines as a concept articulated, interpreted, negotiated and performed by diverse actors in various forms, and also to the empirical studies on the FLOSS development. Theoretically speaking, her research also sheds new light on how innovation, emerging in a dynamic and informal setting, can be codified, verified and deployed in the formal knowledge system. She has successfully defended her thesis on the 2nd of December 2004 and her examiners are Professor Ian Miles (University of Manchester) and Professor Andy Tudor (University of York).
Yuwei, then, worked for a year as a postdoctoral research fellow on the METIS project at the Department of Information Systems at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam with Professor Marleen Huysman from March 2005 to 2006. Meanwhile, she received some fund from the PRIME project to work with Prof. Andrea Bonaccorsi and Dr. Cristina Rossi at the Universita di Pisa (Italy) on the ELISS project, conducting case studies on Free/Libre Open Source Software Projects.
Prior to taking up the position at Salford, Yuwei worked as Research Associate at the coordinating hub of the ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) at the University of Manchester. Her main research at NCeSS focused on gathering user requirements of e-Research technologies, and understanding socio-technical dynamics in the development, implementation and adoption of e-Research technologies, which range from tools for formalising knowledge (e.g., ontology, metadata, folksonomy), for discovering knowledge (e.g., data mining and text mining), and integrating and processing information in different forms (e.g., textual, audio and visual). Apart from research, Yuwei had also taken up administrative and managerial responsibility of several research projects, including the JISC-funded “Using Text Mining for Frame Analysis of Media Content“ (acronym: TMFA) project.
Apart from her academic work, Yuwei has been playing an active role in FLOSS communities. She contributed FLOSS-related articles to the Linux-Magazine (2003 - 2010). She is now a regular participants in various Manchester-based digital communities including Manchester Open Data City, Social Media Cafe Manchester, and Manchester Free Software.
