User:Anelsona

Anne Nelson

Contact: first name (dot) last name @ gmail.com

Twitter: @anelsona

Publications: http://columbia.academia.edu/ANelson

I am an author and adjunct associate professor at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. I have worked extensively in the fields of international human rights and freedom of information, specializing in media development. I was formerly the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (1988-1992) and the director of the International Program at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism (1995-2002). I have taught a number of courses exploring the use of digital media to promote social goals in a development context.

I have worked as a journalist and human rights researcher around the world, covering the wars in El Salvador and Guatemala in the early 1980s and reporting the Philippines, for which I won the Livingston Award. I received a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship for my book on the German Resistance (Red Orchestra), and 2013 Bellagio Fellowship for research on digital media and reading platforms. I am a graduate of Yale University and a member of the Councll on Foreign Relations.

I took part in the Wikimedia in Higher Education summit in 2011 and continue to use Wikipedia extensively in my classes, often through comparative studies of content in different languages combined with exercises in editing. I'm especially interested in extending the benefits of digital media to resource-challenged parts of the world with little connectivity and erratic power supplies. In 2016 I led a research seminar on digital infrastructure in Cuba. We are now building on our findings to explore the potential of offline platforms to support medical training in rural areas of Latin America.

Selected works

"In the Grotto of the Pink Sisters" (Mother Jones, January 1988)

"The Guys" (Play published by Random House and Dramatists Play Service, 2002, feature film, Focus Features, 2003)

Red Orchestra (Random House, 2009)

Wikipedia projects

• New Media and Development at Columbia University, a pilot class at the 2011 founding of the Wikipedia Education Program
• Opportunities and Challenges for Wikipedia in the Arab World
• Wiki Loves the Dominican Republic, a 2017 class project with School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and various wiki community groups

Presentations

• Nelson, Anne (23 February 2013), "Using Wikipedia in a Multilingual Classroom", Wikipedia Day 2013 NYC (New York City: Internet Society New York Chapter), retrieved 19 January 2017 
• Nelson, Anne (8 October 2016), "Wikipedia Cuba: Challenges and Opportunities", WikiConference North America 2016 San Diego (New York City: United States Wikimedians), retrieved 19 January 2017 
• Astrakhan, Yuri; Dutt, Avik; Nelson, Anne; Backer, Alice (15 January 2017), "Multinational Panel", Wikipedia Day 2016 NYC (New York City: Internet Society New York Chapter), retrieved 19 January 2017