About Chris
I'm an Assistant Professor of Technical Communication & Data Visualization in the English Department at Virginia Tech, where I teach courses in technical communication, literacies, and digital-cultural rhetorics of technology.
My research engages questions that frame computer coding as a culturally dynamic form of writing with data, as opposed to simply a result of automated technology alone. You can learn more about this way of understanding coding through my forthcoming article, 'Writing with data: A study of coding on a data-journalism team," which:
- Provides an unusual case of a developer on a data-journalism team, processing and analyzing data sets to support journalistic inquiry, rather than widely studied software development;
- Presents a writing practice framework to guide situated studies that examine how people integrate their historical, social, and technical ideas together through their coding activity; and
- Offers researchers and practitioners concepts that sensitize us to the relations people develop and coordinate as they write code to write with data.
I am also interested in applying computational social science methods to feminist and anti-racist rhetorical theories, as a means to differently understand social relationships in digital environments. I am currently collaborating on a project that examines Twitter discourse surrounding Trump's plans to build the border wall before, during, and after his administration's zero-tolerance immigration policy that separated children from their families.
You can reach me at lindgren@vt.edu or find me on Twitter as @lndgrn.
Here is my CV [PDF] for more information.