Canning to Receive the 2025 ASIS&T Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship

The Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) is delighted to announce that Erin Canning is the recipient of the 2025 Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship Award. The award’s purpose is to foster research in information science by recognizing the year’s most outstanding doctoral dissertation proposal while encouraging and assisting doctoral students in the field with their dissertation research. Canning’s proposal is titled, “Novel application of computational approaches in addressing problematic terminology and descriptions within V&A Museum catalogues.”

Canning is a DPhil student in the Oxford e-Research Centre, Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, and is co-supervised by the Victoria and Albert Museum. Prior to pursuing doctoral studies, they held the position of Ontology Systems Analyst at the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship project (LINCS) and worked at the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto. Canning holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History from Mount Allison University and Masters degrees in Information (MI) and Museum Studies (MMst) from the University of Toronto. Canning’s AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership research explores potential uses of computational methods for critical cataloguing in museums and for enabling critical engagement with museum object data.

In supporting Canning’s application, their primary supervisor David De Roure, Professor of e-Research and Academic Director of Digital Scholarship at Oxford, said, “All members of the supervisory team are very excited by Erin’s research proposal, programme of work and progress. This is an enormously important and yet challenging problem, and Erin has performed exceptionally from the outset.”

Upon learning of their selection as winner of the Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship Award, Canning responded, "I am truly honoured and beyond thrilled to receive the ASIS&T Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship. I am very grateful to the Scholarship Jury and the ASIS&T Board of Directors for their recognition of my research, as well as to my supervisors at the University of Oxford and the Victoria and Albert Museum for their ongoing support."

Canning will receive the grant during the 2025 ASIS&T annual meeting which will be held 14-18 November, 2025 in Crystal City, Virginia.

About ASIS&T

ASIS&T is the pre-eminent professional association for thousands of researchers, developers, practitioners, students, and professors in the field of information science and technology from 50 countries around the world. For more than 85 years, ASIS&T has been leading the search for new and better theories, techniques, and technologies to improve access to information.