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research

In the 17th century, scholar-publishers created the first scientific journals, revolutionising the communication and practice of scholarship. Today, we're at the beginning of a second revolution, as academia slowly awakens to the tranformative potential of the Web.   I'm interested in both pushing this revolution forward, and in studying it as it happens. I'm investigating altmetrics: measuring scholarly impact over the social web instead of through traditional citation. I'm also interested in new publishing practices like scholarly tweeting, overlay journals, alternative peer review forms, and open access. These slides give a good idea of what I've been up to lately; my CV links to other recent publications and talks.

code

ImpactStory

Open-source webapp helping researchers create an impact story highlighting their diverse impacts; co-founder.
screenshot of the feedvis application

FeedVis

An interactive visualization for examining trends in a set of rss feeds. Featured on ReadWriteWeb and Information Aesthetics.
screenshot from the zotero report customizer application

Zotero report customizer

Sorts reports generated by the open-source Zotero reference manager; recommended in the Zotero documentation.

HumanNameParse.php

Extracts the parts of a name (first, middle, nickname, etc.) in all sorts of variously-formatted namestrings; useful for disambiguation.
obfuscation decoder screenshot

Email Obfuscation Decoder

A little JS demo I hacked up to support a blog post on how email obfuscation is pointless.
screenshot of the script's output

Live solar desktop generator

Uses PHP to scrape, organize, and display free solar data, images and forecast from NOAA and NASA in real-time.  [source]

art + design

  • small picture of poster
  • woman with sunglasses; sort of a bad scan because it wouldn't fit in the scanner...
  • An assignment in my infoVis class: self-portrait as a phrenology illustration
  • Image of infographic.
  • A drawing of some horses I made for a friend. I made the drawing, not the horses.

life

Me sitting on a cliff by the sea. After getting my BA (history) and M.Ed from the University of Florida, I worked for five years as a middle school teacher, teaching history, language arts and media. After teaching, I spent some time as a freelance web designer, did some research at the University of Florida's edtech program, and worked as an instructional designer making online courses at UF's Center for Instructional Technology and Training. Since 2009 I've been pursuing on my PhD here at UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science, funded by a 5-year Royster Fellowship. In my spare time, I like making art, photography, watching movies, soccer, ultralight backpacking, judo, and music.