Projects

Technology Matters Podcast is a podcast project created collaboratively in my course on the cultural impact of information technology, "Icarus's Parachute". The 8 sessions were recorded in Winter 2011. Each session was a roundtable discussion on one of the following technologies which also served as research clusters: smartphones, social networks, touch screens, p2p tech, streaming video, prosthetics, biotechnology, digital game technology. The course and project is archived by the Comparative History of Ideas program @ UW.

The Critical Philosophy is a blog about Critical Philosophy as expressed primarily in the works of Immanuel Kant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charles Sanders Peirce. The blog was originally created to facilitate the close-reading seminar on Kant, but has expanded to provide commentary on post-Kantian philosophers who took his work in a different direction than German Idealists such as Fichte and Hegel.

The Critical Gaming Project is a group of graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Washington working together to create an online resource for the critical study of digital games. We facilitate discussion and development of original courses and focus groups, maintain an archive of past course syllabi and annotated topical bibliographies, publicize relevant events on campus and in the local area, and provide a space for scholars to share information.

My dissertation is broadly about the significance of novel both as a form of media and a unique mode of reflective inquiry in the context of our new media ecosystem. The tentative title is "Reasoning and Reflection in the Novel and Digital Games" and has chapters on the place of the novel in the new medial ecology, the problem of affect and the novel , ergodics and the function of lore in digital roleplaying games, and the idea of "slow media" which argues for a focus on time in media studies.

In the perennial quest for the ultimate technology for organizing scholarship, reading notes, and in-progess compositions I have recently started using MediaWiki to draft my prospectus and dissertation, fellowship proposals, as well as manage everyday reading notes and teaching materials. I have found that using wiki technology serves me better than the blog which is not as malleable in its structure and shaped more for expression than reference and revision. Wiki features like edit-history and version comparison, print to PDF, image gallery, and collaborative options make it a more dynamic choice.