Rate My Professor James Hodges

Dr. James Hodges is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at San José State University. He earned his Ph.D. from Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information in 2020 and a Master of Arts in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University. Prior to his appointment at SJSU, Hodges held the position of Bullard Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin from 2020 to 2022. He taught courses in the Master of Information program and the undergraduate Digital Communication, Information, and Media minor at Rutgers University. Earlier in his career, he worked for multiple media companies in New York City, bringing practical industry experience to his academic pursuits.

Hodges researches the cultural history of computing, focusing on software interfaces, digital archives, and preservation. His current book project applies digital forensics to reveal the technical legacy of 1960s counterculture in early multimedia computing. He also pursues projects on the evidentiary value of digital objects in non-institutional preservation contexts. Research interests include archival collections, electronic documents, information and society or culture, and preservation of collections. Hodges serves as Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, University of Virginia, and as Senior Book Reviews Editor for Information & Culture. Key publications encompass “A bibliographic archeology of game-like conspiracy narratives: examining the Ong’s Hat Incunabula catalog” (Journal of Documentation, 2025); “Taxonomizing Information Practices in a Large Conspiracy Movement: Using Early QAnon as a Case Study” (Information & Culture, 58(2), 2023); “Preserving algorithmic systems: a synthesis of overlapping approaches, materialities and contexts” (Journal of Documentation, 2023); “Coastal water information orders: Reverse-engineering New York City’s data dashboards” (Social Studies of Science, 2025); “Forensically reconstructing biomedical maintenance labor: PDF metadata under the epistemic conditions of COVID-19” (Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 72(11), 2021); and “Transcoding Authenticity: Preserving Unreleased Gaming Software Outside of Memory Institutions” (Journal of Documentation, 78(2), 2021). These works underscore his influence in information science, digital preservation, and computing history.