About

Megan Sapnar Ankerson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. Her research and teaching interests involve new media and visual culture, web history, software studies, memory, time, and media aesthetics. She is the author of 'Dot-com Design: The Rise of a Usable, Social, Commercial Web,' published by New York University Press in 2018. Her current research project, titled 'Big Data Time Machines: AI, Sci-Fi, and the Future of History,' historicizes large-scale distributed computational systems and neural networks alongside shifting narrative conventions and political concerns of popular time travel media over the course of sixty years (1964-2024). This project investigates how these computational systems function as time machines, transforming the daily digital experience and reconfiguring the temporal infrastructures of everyday life. Her work explores the critical entanglement of science and humanities to address complex problems of contemporary times, emphasizing the material-semiotic systems that shape our understanding of history, time, and digital culture.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• World Wide Web
• Internet privacy
• Physics

Selected publications

• Big Data Time Machines: Decolonizing the Futures of Post-Digital Histories

  AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research · 2026-01-02

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper offers a critical analysis of “Big Data Time Machines,” platforms built on AI and Big Data that use metaphors of time travel in relation to large historical datasets and digital archives. Drawing on decolonial perspectives that aim to unsettle western power structures around Big Tech, the paper focuses on the EU-funded large-scale research initiative (LSRI) called “Time Machine Europe,” a large collaborative international alliance devoted to using machine learning to extract the “Big Data of the Past for the future of Europe.” Through a material-semiotic analysis of the discourses and design strategies that structure archival encounters with select Local Time Machine projects, the paper identifies how “archive aesthetics” are used to organize historical journeys that reinforce long-standing white settler positions, but can also be used to creatively challenge these knowledge monopolies. The paper concludes by turning to speculative fiction about time travel by Black, Latinx, Caribbean, and Indigenous storytellers whose work might help internet scholars, artists, archivists and historians to work together in rupturing the western temporal imagination and imagining alternative and more just data histories and futures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 5. Users, Usability, and User Experience (2000– 2005)

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Dot-Com Design

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• 3. Designing a Web of Legitimate Experts (1995– 1997)

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • World Wide Web
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• 2. Cool Quality and the Commercial Web (1994– 1995)

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • World Wide Web
  PublisherDOI

• Dot-Com Design: The Rise of a Usable, Social, Commercial Web

  2018-07-24 · 6 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Lez takes time: designing lesbian contact in geosocial networking apps

  2017-06-26 · 12 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  As dating and hookup apps for gay men and hetero-identified users flourish, the slow growth of lesbian-identified apps is continually framed as a “problem” by developers, investors, and users. We observe this “problem” to be one of designing lesbian contact, a problem that materializes as a queer incommensurability at the intersection of app design, technology startup culture, and perceptions of lesbian sexuality. While locative media scholarship foregrounds the social dimensions of space, we consider temporal orienting devices that design contact among women seeking women using a case study of the lesbian dating app, Dattch (rebranded as Her in 2015). Dattch's development and eventual reconfiguration into Her exemplifies how lesbian contact is negotiated through an iterative design process that tries to manage the pressures of a rapidly moving, capital-driven “appified” market.

  PublisherDOI

• Lez takes time: designing lesbian contact in geosocial networking apps

  Critical Studies in Media Communication · 2016-01-01 · 50 citations

  articleSenior author

  As dating and hookup apps for gay men and hetero-identified users flourish, the slow growth of lesbian-identified apps is continually framed as a “problem” by developers, investors, and users. We observe this “problem” to be one of designing lesbian contact, a problem that materializes as a queer incommensurability at the intersection of app design, technology startup culture, and perceptions of lesbian sexuality. While locative media scholarship foregrounds the social dimensions of space, we consider temporal orienting devices that design contact among women seeking women using a case study of the lesbian dating app, Dattch (rebranded as Her in 2015). Dattch's development and eventual reconfiguration into Her exemplifies how lesbian contact is negotiated through an iterative design process that tries to manage the pressures of a rapidly moving, capital-driven “appified” market.

  PublisherDOI

• Social Media and the “Read-Only” Web: Reconfiguring Social Logics and Historical Boundaries

  Social Media + Society · 2015-07-01 · 21 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The web’s historical periodization as Web 1.0 (“read-only”) and Web 2.0 (“read/write”) eras continues to hold sway even as the umbrella term “social media” has become the preferred way to talk about today’s ecosystem of connective media. Yet, we have much to gain by not exclusively positing social media platforms as a 21st-century phenomenon. Through case studies of two commercially sponsored web projects from the mid-1990s—Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab’s Day in the Life of Cyberspace and Rick Smolan’s 24 Hours in Cyberspace—this article examines how notions of social and publics were imagined and designed into the web at the start of the dot-com boom. In lieu of a discourse of versions, I draw on Lucy Suchman’s trope of configuration as an analytic tool for rethinking web historiography. By tracing how cultural imaginaries of the Internet as a public space are conjoined with technological artifacts (content management systems, templates, session tracking, and e-commerce platforms) and reconfigured over time, the discourses of “read-only publishing” and the “social media revolution” can be reframed not as exclusively oppositional logics, but rather, as mutually informing the design and development of today’s social, commercial, web.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Read/Write the Digital Archive: Strategies for Historical Web Research

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2015-12-04 · 14 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sarah M. Murray

  1 shared

• Sarah S. Murray

  University of California, San Diego

  1 shared