Manika Lamba

Assistant Professor, University of Oklahoma

Knowledge infrastructure is only visible when it fails. Metadata errors erase scholarship. Computational tools locked behind programming expertise exclude entire professional communities. My research sits at the intersection of computational methods and information infrastructure, studying how knowledge gets organized, and accessed.

My research addresses three connected areas:

1. Making computational methods accessible: I build open-source tools that remove programming as a barrier to research.
2. Auditing information systems: I examine where metadata, open datasets, and classification systems introduce errors or encode inequities that affect the communities they describe.
3. Mapping scholarly and cultural knowledge at scale: I use text mining, topic modeling, and large language models to identify patterns in how knowledge is produced, organized, and discovered across digital libraries and repositories.