I am an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Susquehanna University’s Communications Department where I also serve as Director for our Center for Teaching and Learning. I specialize in data science, cultural analytics, the digital humanities, the history of information science, communication, new media rhetoric, and statistics. My research has appeared in numerous academic journals, such as the Programming Historian, Digital Humanities Quarterly, The International Journal of Digital Humanities, and The Journal of Open Humanities Data. I have a range of interests, and this blog is an attempt to share my thoughts on a variety of topics along with my various data science and digital media projects.
Currently, my research centers on two major book manuscripts. The first entitled Cultural Data Analytics in R: A Tidy Approach provides a methodological framework for dealing with large-scale humanities cultural data. In particular, it explores how scholars in the digital humanities and media studies can utilize computational methodologies such as network analysis, multivariate regression, natural language processing, and neural networks in the R programming language to study phenomena in cases where close qualitative research is prohibitive or misleading.
My second book manuscript is entitled The Computer Comes Home: A Failed Revolution. In it, I analyze the personal computer’s domestication in America during the 1970s and 1980s and its impact on the global media environment. This work has earned financial support from the University of Minnesota’s Charles Babbage Institute’s Arthur L. Norberg Grant, MIT Press, and William & Mary’s Michael R. Halleran Provost Dissertation Fellowship, amongst others. As popular media and news coverage stress the importance of computational technologies for political change (the Moldova Civil Unrest, the Iranian Election of 2009, the Tunisian Revolution, and the Egyptian Revolution), my work challenges beliefs in the computer as a politically radical force by investigating the historical rhetoric surrounding its domestication. In contrast to journalistic and hagiographic accounts focused on a select group of Silicon Valley “visionaries,” I rely on newspaper coverage, hobbyist magazines, popular media, and advertisements to read “against the grain” and recover voices overlooked. Through this, I show that the device was not a source of liberation, but instead served as a reactionary response to the political radicalism of the 1960s.