About Me

I’m an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Emory University Writing Program and affiliated faculty in Data and Decision Sciences. I also co-direct the Emory Center for the Future of Trust. I bring my research on citation analysis and disciplinary metaphor into the classroom, teaching students to draw on and synthesize multiple academic traditions as they write. They learn to adopt data-driven methods from across fields transparently, reflexively, and for justice.

My work brings together writing studies and digital humanities. Specializing in computational text analysis, citation analytics, and the rhetorics of source use, I treat the transformation and visualization of data as rhetorical practices. I use co-citation methods from bibliometrics to map research traditions across disciplinary areas, focusing on the interdisciplinary scholarship that otherwise distinct communities cite in common and that citation metrics tend to bury. This research involves attending to the metaphors that scholars use to describe how their work relates to others’—whether embedded in networked conversations, or standing on scholarly terrain—and which structure the computational methods available to them when reviewing the published literature. My aim is to teach writers to be conscious of the choices they make when surveying a research landscape, and to make those choices visible to their readers.

This approach has emerged from my training across multiple fields. I earned my bachelor’s degrees in English and physics at SUNY Geneseo, where the interdisciplinary seminars of the Edgar Fellows program let me bridge the humanities and sciences. Here, I taught writing for the sciences in physics lab courses while starting projects in musical acoustics and digital humanities (DH).

At Northeastern University, I found my footing in frameworks from rhetoric and writing studies for how language organizes and maintains our knowledges and communities. In these years, I held roles across digital scholarship and academic publishing that motivated my doctoral work and shape my current collaborations. I managed several digital projects and worked as a research assistant on a multigenerational project in writing program assessment that inspired my commitment to mutual mentorship of students and colleagues. I also served as a Managing Editor of Digital Humanities Quarterly, the leading open-access journal in DH. My dissertation recovered an early method of co-citation analysis for mapping the “landscape” of academic fields, using it to find common ground between researchers across DH and writing studies doing digital work. The dissertation’s non-traditional format incorporated a code notebook in the literate programming paradigm, walking my readers through my exploratory analysis.

This project solidified my commitments to methodological transparency alongside interdisciplinarity. Importing methods from another field like network science or bibliometrics involves not only getting the methods to work, but tracing the published work in those fields to understand the purposes and commitments that inflect how they work. That’s what enables me to justify my analytical choices, whether the choice at hand is a vocabulary I’ve borrowed from another tradition or decisions that turn messy and multiple data sources into a workable corpus. My current research extends the project, developing a methodology for citation analysis suited to verifying information in the age of generative AI.

I’ve designed and taught courses in writing for engineering and technical fields, in data analysis for humanities professionals, and on emergent interdisciplinary frameworks like algorithmic rhetoric. At Emory, I regularly teach a course on Technical Writing for Data Science, seminars on topics like disinformation and citation, and the gateway and capstone courses for our Rhetoric, Writing, and Information Design minor. With my Center for the Future of Trust co-director Jo Guldi, I have co-designed and co-taught an Introduction to Text as Data Course, a survey course for data science students on humanistic data analysis that uses analog activities to teach them how computational text analysis methods work.

Beyond Emory, I serve on the Editorial Collective of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, where I am currently Co-Editor of Reviews.

When I’m not teaching, writing, or coding, I’m probably either playing tennis, taking some photos, or pulling an espresso. You can tell from the way I say the word “coffee” that I was born and raised in Queens in New York City, and I’ve been part of a few chamber and barbershop choruses in different parts of New York State.