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. 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.

Interdisciplinarity

My research and teaching synthesize methods across fields and reflect on the frictions of learning and using methods beyond one’s disciplinary expertise.

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).

In my doctoral training at Northeastern University, I found my footing in frameworks from rhetoric and writing studies for how language organizes and maintains disciplinary knowledge. I attend to the metaphors that scholars use to describe how their work relates to others’ work, whether embedded in networked conversations or standing on scholarly terrain. These metaphors structure the computational methods available to them when reviewing the published literature.

Methodological Transparency

Importing methods from another field like network science or bibliometrics involves not only implementing the methods, but tracing the published work in those fields to understand the purposes and commitments that inflect how the methods work. That understanding helps 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.

Beyond Academics

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.