Hello World
Welcome to my new blog. I just finished my first semester as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the San José State University School of Information, and having a new job feels like an appropriate occasion to begin experimenting with a new form of scholarly communication. I played around with Substack last year, but all the ownership shakeups at Twitter recently have driven home the value of hosting my own content. I’ll still post on Twitter and Substack, at least for the near-term future, but I’ve never been one to put all my eggs in one basket.
The aforementioned Substack went pretty dormant following my offer from San José State last spring, because I became extremely busy wrapping up projects at UT Austin, as well as planning for my imminent cross-country move (the third major move in three years, as a matter of fact). Rest assured, dear reader: I’ve been plenty busy in the past 6 months, even if my Substack wasn’t getting updates. I’d like to write a post sharing what I learned during my job application, interview, and relocation processes eventually, because I think it could help other recent grads and postdocs. Stay tuned for that.
In the research department, I’m still finishing up a variety of projects that started while I was in my postdoc at UT. After finishing my dissertation at the height of early COVID, it seemed important that I use my post-Ph.D. years to engage with emerging needs in areas that were hit hard by recent political upheavals, including healthcare informatics, algorithmic fairness, and mis- and disinformation. Digital preservation and computer history are still my main concerns, but I’ve found ways to channel my knowledge about those topics into places where they can help meet present and emerging challenges.
In the algorithmic fairness area, UT Professor Ciaran Trace and I recently received a faculty fellowship from the Good Systems initiative that supported our development of two journal articles and a book chapter, all under review at the moment. I’ll share more details once the review dust has settled—I don’t want to say too much just yet.
I also have a paper that will be out in Information & Culture early next semester, which uses web archives to examine the information practices of early participants in the QAnon conspiracy movement. I’m prepared for this paper to potentially cause a small amount of controversy, because it offers conclusions that are unpopular among many in the disinformation research space: I show that conspiracy theories like QAnon, while outlandish and untrue in many regards, are still constructed via interaction with authentic sources. In other words, these conspiracies aren’t just invented from whole cloth. Instead, they emerge from idiosyncratic, if sometimes willfully false, interpretations of legitimate information. No full paper yet, but I covered a bit more about this project when I first announced it on Substack last November. Stay tuned.
Another few interesting research updates come in the form of invited talks and chapters. My digital forensics research got me invited to contribute to a methods volume at SAGE last spring, and I now have a chapter on using web crawlers to create a research corpus available in their Doing Research Online series. It felt nice to write something so clearly practical for a change, and I hope that some advanced undergraduates and early-stage grad students find it helpful. It might be useful for more advanced scholars who simply want to learn a new tool as well.
I was also invited last spring to speak at the Reconsidering John C. Lilly symposium, which allowed me to revisit some of the web archive analysis I did during my dissertation. What I did there was essentially peel apart the HTML code and ICANN records from a cluster of websites made by Lilly and his contemporaries in the 1990s psychedelic counterculture, revealing some of the contours that connect psychedelia and hippie culture with big digital technology businesses. That project is in the process of becoming a book chapter, and I’ll certainly have more to say about it soon.
Speaking of the future, I’m thrilled to be a part of the San José State community, because it offers me a deeper foothold in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley from which I can launch future research projects. I’m eager to build deeper connections with people at the local institutions that have helped me write my dissertation and test out ideas over the past several years, ranging from the Computer History Museum to the archives at Stanford. I work remotely from New York City most of the time, but I’ve already made a few research trips to the Bay and I’m always planning for more. If you’re in the area and you’d like to chat about possible synergies, please get in touch! Same goes for those of you reading from the New York metro area. Since I generally work remotely, I’m eager to build a bit of extra-institutional collegiality in my home city. And of course, working remotely also reminds me every day that I’m a citizen of the Internet. If you need help getting access to any of the articles I linked, please don’t hesitate to reach out.