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 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.

Download my CV.