critical makings

A significant part of my scholarship involves critically thinking through processes of making, via speculative design or by working on video games and other digital media forms.

Much of my critical making work has happened in the ModLab Digital Humanities Laboratory at UC Davis and at various units in Notre Dame. I have also worked with the Data Science Initiative, the Genome Center, and the Digital Scholars Lab at UC Davis, and at IIT Indore in the discipline of Computer Science and Engineering.

I was the project director of Frack! The Game, a strategy game that takes cues from real-world incidents to explore the ethical, socioeconomic and environmental landscape of fracking.

​I was the lead developer on a multi-university, NSF-funded collaboration, via the Genome Center and ModLab at UC Davis, that investigates the role of narratives in citizen science. To that end, we developed, implemented, and (quantitatively and qualitatively) tested a science-fiction graphic-novel-based story module for foldit.

​I was also a part of the Critical Wearables group, a speculative design collaboration that aims to critically think about concepts of self and subjectivity in the era of wearable computing, asking what forms of sociality can emerge outside the top-down corporate model of wearable tracking devices.

In the past, I have participated in a number of other digital humanities and big data projects, working on, among other things, broadsides in early-modern English literature, machine (self-)learning preference networks, the rhetoric of the Twitter bots in the 2016 US Presidential election and contemporary meme archeologies. I have also co-designed, with Joy Miller and Jacob Hagelberg, an alternate reality game at UC Davis.