About

As of August 2011, I will be an Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of Eng­lish at Pur­due Uni­ver­sity. I study and teach top­ics related to infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture, rhetoric, sci­ence, and tech­nol­ogy. I have pub­lished and pre­sented research on how web pro­fes­sion­als per­suade each other to adopt design prac­tices and stan­dards. This web­site doc­u­ments that work by includ­ing links to my CV, pub­lished writ­ing, and research notes.

I’m fun­da­men­tally inter­ested in three topic areas: (1) rhetorics of Web devel­op­ment, (2) infor­mation tech­nol­ogy assem­blages of the Web, and (3) rhetor­i­cal approaches to study­ing infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture. I’m cur­rently inter­ested in apply­ing those inter­ests in infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture, infor­ma­tion labor, and tech­no­log­i­cal assem­blages by devel­op­ing online dis­ci­pli­nary map­ping tools. You can read more about this on my research overview page

I use this research to sup­port a per­sonal mis­sion: I am fun­da­men­tally inter­ested in build­ing a high-quality uni­ver­sity cur­ricu­lum for web pro­fes­sion­als. I’m not the only per­son with this goal (thank­fully), but there is a lot of work to be done. I believe it’s impor­tant to draw insight from aca­d­e­mic dis­ci­plines and work­ing pro­fes­sion­als to cre­ate the strongest edu­ca­tion pro­gram pos­si­ble. Web pro­fes­sion­als are rhetori­cians of the 21st cen­tury. Draw­ing from the old while com­bin­ing with the new is cru­cial for a good edu­ca­tion pro­gram. I believe that we still need to develop ade­quate rhetorics for talk­ing about web communication.

My dis­ser­ta­tion, How to Build an Infra­struc­ture: Rhetorics of Web Stan­dard­iza­tion, doc­u­mented how web stan­dards have been talked about within trade jour­nals, mono­graphs, and web sites. The research draws from Sci­ence & Tech­nol­ogy Stud­ies and the Rhetoric of Sci­ence to bet­ter under­stand how devel­op­ers jus­tify stan­dards that pre­scribe how con­tent should be ren­dered on the Web. How to Build an Infra­struc­ture rep­re­sents my first steps to under­stand­ing the web devel­op­ment com­mu­nity as a dis­ci­pline so that I could begin build­ing its fun­da­men­tal con­cepts into the field of rhetor­i­cal stud­ies. I’m hop­ing to simul­ta­ne­ously expand the notion of rhetor­i­cal stud­ies while build­ing a solid web cur­ricu­lum at the uni­ver­sity level.

In case you’re curi­ous, the sub­ti­tle of this site comes from a book by Geof­frey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star: Sort­ing Things Out: Clas­si­fi­ca­tion and its Con­se­quences. The book describes infra­struc­tural inver­sion, a con­cep­tual tool for think­ing about infor­ma­tion infra­struc­tures. I think that it’s a use­ful way to think about what I do. I also just like the word infrastructure.