NB: Click here to view my CV (current as of 3/1/17).

My current research is concerned, most generally, with the cultural and critical dimensions of data visualization. I’m at work on a book about the history of data visualization from the eighteenth century to the present, emphasizing how the modern visualizing impulse emerged from a set of complex intellectual and politically-charged contexts in the United States and around the Atlantic. In other work, I attempt to theorize the function of visualization for the humanities, both in terms of its ability to reframe historical data in new ways, and in terms of its capacity to call attention to the processes and methods of scholarly research. A final component of my research involves the practice of visualization. I’m interested in designing data visualizations that present concepts, advance arguments, and perform critique.

I’m also finalizing my first book, Matters of Taste: Eating, Aesthetics, and the Early American Archive, which explores how eating offers a new way of thinking about aesthetics in early America—and, therefore, about the philosophical work of food and its significance for the people who prepare, serve, and consume it.

In addition, I serve as associate series editor (with Matthew K. Gold) for Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print/digital publication stream from the University of Minnesota Press that explores debates in the field as they emerge. The next annual volume is slated for a March 2016 release.

Other recent (and forthcoming) publications include:

• “Timescape and Memory: Visualizing Big Data at the 9/11 Memorial Museum.” Forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers, 2017.
• “Speculative Aesthetics.” Invited response. Early American Literature 51.2 (Spring 2016): 437-445.
• With Matthew K. Gold, “Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field.” Introduction to Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
• With Jacob Eisenstein and Iris Sun, “Exploratory Thematic Analysis for Digitized Archival Collections.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (formerly Literary and Linguistic Computing) 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.