NB: Click here to view my CV (current as of 9/1/18).
My current research centers on the cultural and critical dimensions of data. I’m at work on an interactive book on the history of data visualization, tentatively titled Data by Design. Awarded an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication, Data by Design emphasizes how the modern visualizing impulse emerged from a set of complex intellectually and politically-charged contexts in the United States and across the Atlantic. My other current book project, Data Feminism, is a trade book co-authored with Catherine D’Ignazio (Emerson College/MIT). This book introduces a general audience to the idea of data feminism: a way of thinking about data and data science that is informed by the past several decades of feminist activism and critical thought. A final component of my research involves the application of quantitative methods to humanistic questions. In particular, I’m interested in exploring how quantitative methods can be used to surface otherwise invisible forms of labor, agency, and action.
I’m also finalizing my first book, An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States, for a Spring 2020 publication date with the University of Minnesota Press. An Archive of Taste explores how eating offers a new way of thinking about aesthetics in the early republic—and, therefore, about the philosophical work of food and its significance for the people who prepare, present, and consume it.
I serve as associate series editor (with Matthew K. Gold) for Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press), a hybrid print/digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. The most recent book in the series is Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019.
Other recent (and forthcoming) publications include:
- “Data.” Coauthored with Miriam Posner. In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, eds. Glenn Hendler and Bruce Burgett. Forthcoming from NYU Press.
- “Code.” In Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments, eds. Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, and Jentery Sayers. Forthcoming from the Modern Language Association, 2018.
- “Timescape and Memory: Visualizing Big Data at the 9/11 Memorial Museum.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers (Routledge, 2018): 433-442.
- “The Shape of History: Reimagining Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s Feminist Visualization Work.” Coauthored with Caroline Foster, Adam Hayward, Erica Pramer, and Shivani Negi. Feminist Media Histories 3.3 (Summer 2017): 149-153.
- “Data as Media.” Coauthored with Miriam Posner. Introduction to special issue. Feminist Media Histories 3.3 (Summer 2017): 1-8.
Additional publications include:
- “Speculative Aesthetics.” Invited response. Early American Literature 51.2 (Spring 2016): 437-445.
- “Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field.” Coauthored with Matthew K. Gold. Introduction to Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
- “Exploratory Thematic Analysis for Digitized Archival Collections.” Coauthored with Jacob Eisenstein and Iris Sun. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 30.4 (December 2015): 130-141.
- “Dinner-Table Bargains: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Senses of Taste.” Early American Literature 49.2 (Spring 2014): 403-433.
- “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature 85.4 (December 2013): 661-688.
- “American Studies after the Internet.” Review essay. American Quarterly 64.4 (December 2012): 861-72.
If you’d like me to send you a copy of one of these publications, or any others, please just drop me a line.