About Us

Abby Alty: I am a white cisgender able-bodied queer woman completing a Master of Information Studies part-time at the University of Ottawa. I am from Yellowknife, Northwest Territories and have lived for most of my life in western Canada. Currently, I work in Public Health, but I have previously held employment in the environmental sector. I enjoy listening to many genres of music, but I do not listen to active rock. The topic of this project appealed to me because radio is a medium that is freely available, has some government oversight and is played in public spaces, yet promotes commercial interests. I have learned a lot about the genre by curating the dataset and I look forward to more research and analysis on the topic.

Dalie Brisson: I’m a French-Canadian student enrolled in a Master of Information Studies at the University of Ottawa. I am a white cisgendered, able-bodied straight woman and I grew up in a town called Embrun in Eastern Ontario. Since starting my post-secondary studies I’ve worked in various positions at the University of Ottawa, until recently where I decided to apply to a government agency. One of my past work experiences as a research assistant allowed me to work with a dataset containing biographic data on country music artists. The published research based on this data uncovered women’s marginal status in the genre (Watson, 2019). This project piqued my curiosity because I wanted to find out if similar results could be revealed from active rock data. I don’t listen to active rock with the exception of a few artists, so this project will surely be insightful.