You have reached Crystal Kile.
I live and work in the southern Appalachian region, in the 37341 zip code area (Harrison, Tennessee), just north of Chattanooga.
I am a librarian, Americanist, and independent information practitioner working across archives, media, and contemporary culture. My work focuses on how people come to know what they know: how knowledge is shaped, circulated, stabilized, and believed within American life.
I approach librarianship as a cultural and interpretive practice grounded in information literacy. My areas of work include digital curation, collection stewardship, and long-term access—how texts, collections, and artifacts persist, remain legible over time, and can be re-encountered under changing conditions.
From 1997 to 2010, I built and directed a feminist participatory media lab at the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women at Tulane University. That work was grounded in media production, documentation, and public-facing interpretation, and it continues to inform how I think about infrastructure, collaboration, and cultural memory.
I hold an MA in Popular Culture Studies and earned an MSIS from the University of Tennessee’s School of Information Sciences in 2017. My practice aligns with the New Librarianship and Open movements, with an emphasis on access, stewardship, and the public life of knowledge.
I facilitate the College of the Alien Information Theory Book Club (CAITBC) as an extension of this work. CAITBC is a para-institutional study environment devoted to American life, media, myth, and the conditions under which meaning is produced and shared. It operates as a distributed reading room and field site for collaborative interpretation, where materials, participants, and signals come into relation.
This site serves as both a professional base and an active field environment for that practice.