Anna Talley, Doctoral Researcher
Anna Talley is a researcher specialising in modern and contemporary design. She is a fully-funded DTP student supported by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities and is an affiliate of both Design Informatics and the Edinburgh Futures Institute. In 2021, Anna earned her MA in Design History and Material Culture from the V&A/Royal College of Art, and she holds a BFA in Art and Design History from the Pratt Institute. She is due to complete her PhD (Design, Edinburgh College of Art) in 2025.
Anna’s primary research interests include communication design, digital material culture, histories of technology and curatorial practice. Her interdisciplinary doctoral research explores the role of communication design in shaping how post-factual news is produced, mediated and distributed in the United States. Beginning with late nineteenth-century print forms of sensationalist news design, the project investigates the evolution and impact of these early forms on information disorder today by investigating case studies of websites and digital infrastructures. Other research interests include computational methods for historical analysis, ethics, media studies and political theory.
Interested in the nascent field of digital design history, Anna presented a paper titled “Rethinking Research Methods for Digital Material Culture” at the Design History Society Conference in September 2022. This paper inspired a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Design History on Design History and Digital Material Culture, of which Anna is Guest Editor. In 2023, Anna completed a project for the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Design & Digital section on collecting digital objects and presented a paper on the project along with the section’s Senior Curator, Corinna Gardner, at the Born Digital Cultural Heritage Conference, held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne in November 2023. Anna also works closely with the University of Edinburgh’s web archiving team, and in 2023, she co-organised a training event for PhD researchers on using web archives for humanities research projects. She also works quite closely with the Design Research Society and has worked extensively on a digitisation project of the Society’s archives. Past projects have also included Design in Quarantine, a digital archive of design responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was awarded the Design History Society’s 2020 Virtual Design History Student Award and received international press coverage.
Anna is always open to collaborations, so do reach out if you have any questions or would be interested in working on a project together.
Research Interests
- Modern and contemporary design history (communication, product, digital)
- Digital humanities
- Information disorder (mis/disinformation) and polycrisis
- Curatorial practice/museum studies