Introduction
Introduction
I am a recent PhD of Information Science & Technology at Syracuse University’s iSchool, and I am currently on the academic job market.
My primary research are is closely tied to memetics: the study of memes. However, I am approaching memes in a unique direction as a cultural heritage informatician. Previous research on the subject either aligns with Richard Dawkins’ original conception of them as being the cultural analogy to genes or with Limor Shifman’s internet meme. My work, by contrast provides a synthesis of these two perspectives with theoretical updates for contemporary information, media, and cybernetic theory. As an information-centric scholar, my work contributes to the areas of cultural heritage, memory studies, documentation research, and information dynamics.
I am continuing my work for The Network Influence and Information Curation Lab (NIIC), which is a lab managed by Syracuse University’s iSchool dean, Jeff Hemsley, founded by Jeff, Yiran Duan (now a Assistant Teaching Professor at University of Washington’s iSchool), and myself. My work for NIIC mostly involves managing research projects related to my primary research area, developing an information-centric research space for “memes.” I have published a set of interrellated papers in prestegious information-centric journals and conferences that theoreize memes as they are related to cultural heritage informatics, information organization, documentation, and memory studies. Also some of these papers develop what I have called “the methodology of difference.” This is an ongoing project, which I hope develops into a full book manuscript in the near future. Also related, I am working towards a multimodal approach to cross-platform research and cultural analytics.
I am also currently an independent research affiliate of the Center for Computational and Data Sciences (CCDS), focused primarily on the Gravity Spy citizen science project managed by Dr. Kevin Crowston and Dr. Carsten Østerlund. My work for Gravity Spy over the last two years has been related to updating their information system, and developing AI agents for summarizing highly specialized discourse across relevant knowledge groups to lower the knowledge gaps between them. Developing these tools provides more accessibility for laboratory scientists, engineers, and citizen scientists to communicate across boundaries of their relevant specializations.
I am also loosely connected to the research at Metadata Lab. This lab’s primary focus is in science collaboration in Science of Science research. This lab primarily uses GenBank repository data to develop an understanding of how collaborations occur and affect careers of biomedical and genetic scientists. Much of my work for this lab has been in generating tools to develop more granular data from existing GenBank data, such as DOis and PDF’s of publications, and data merging and integration from third-party sources such as CrossRef, Google Scholar, and other scholarly sites of data curation.
To learn more about me personally or to see my full list of academic contributions, please take a look at my “About” page or academic vitae below!