We in the Mina Rees Library are delighted to welcome Dr. Shannon Mattern, Director of Creative Research at Metropolitan New York Library Council, as our speaker at this Spring’s Friends of the Library program and luncheon.
Dr. Mattern’s presentation is titled Pointing at Clouds: Indexing, Searching, and Citing in an Age of AI Smog, and builds on her 2025 Design Index residency in the library at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, where she explored various iterations of the index: as a bibliographic convention, an organizational method, a media format, a financial instrument, a corporeal appendage, an intellectual architecture, a literary genre, a creative form, a semiotic concept, and an embodiment of agency. She’ll consider how digital technologies — and AI in particular — have transformed the index, making it much more difficult to point toward trustworthy sources, give credit where it’s due, and establish accountability for infrastructural injustices. And she’ll close by imagining how we might we build an index of resistant, remediating practices.
Dr. Shannon Mattern is Director of Creative Research at the Metropolitan New York Library Council, a state-founded, member-supported, non-profit network connecting hundreds of libraries and archives. She previously served on Metro’s board of directors and later as its president. In Spring 2025 she was the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress, a position nominated by the Librarian of Congress herself; and in Summer 2025 she was invited to serve as the Design Indexer in residence at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
Across 23 years in the academy, Dr. Mattern held tenured full professorships in three fields: media studies, anthropology, and art history. She has published four books and over 100 articles and book chapters and (co-)edited four collections. Dr. Mattern’s writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; sites where data intersect with art and design; and media that shape our sensory experiences. Much of her work can be seen at her website Words in Space (https://wordsinspace.net/).
The event will be held in the CUNY Graduate Center’s William P. Kelly Skylight Room (9th floor) on Friday, March 13, 12-2pm. Lunch will be served.
This is a yearly event held by the Mina Rees Library’s Friends of the Library. This year’s event is co-sponsored by the Graduate Center’s Digital Humanities, Data Visualization, Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and Public Scholarship programs, the New Media Lab, and the Center for the Humanities.
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Maura Smale is Chief Librarian at the CUNY Graduate Center. 
