Hello! I am an Assistant Professor in the University of
Washington's
Information School ,
where I started the
Lab for Computing Cultural Heritage . I am also an associate faculty member in the
Stroum Center for Jewish Studies , an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the
Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering
and a
Data Science Affiliate of the eScience Institute .
Before starting in the iSchool, I was a
Kluge Fellow in Digital Studies at the Library of Congress.
I completed my Ph.D. in the
Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering
at the University of Washington, which was supported by an NSF Graduate Research
Fellowship in machine learning. Previously, I was a 2020
Innovator in Residence
at the Library of Congress. You can read more
about my project, Newspaper Navigator here .
You can read more about my recent work on my publications page . For example, I'm currently working on a project called GovScape , which supports multimodal search for over 10 million U.S. government PDFs.
essays ,
which have appeared in
Longreads ,
The New Republic ,
WIRED ,
Current Affairs ,
the Bennington Review ,
Jacobin ,
Gawker ,
Real Life ,
Bright Wall/Dark Room ,
Protean Magazine ,
and
GoldFlakePaint .
I'm perhaps best known for my essay
in The New Republic about being the first member of the public to watch Jerry Lewis's footage of The Day the Clown Cried . My essay on the rise of
betting for Current Affairs was named a Curators' Pick for Best in Journalism by The Syllabus ; it was also translated into Italian and featured
as the cover story of Internazionale (18/24 aprile 2025, Numero 1610). I received the 2026
American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) Writing Award in the Technology category for my essay, Uncanny Testimony, in Longreads .
newsletter to share my writing as it is published.
Digital Humanities Quarterly ,
a member of the
Digital Public Library of America’s Cultural Heritage Steering Committee ,
an advisory board member of the Research Society of American Periodicals ,
an editorial board member of the Nineteenth-century Data Collective
and Cultural Analytics ,
a founding affiliate of the University of Washington’s
Center for Advancing Libraries, Museums, and Archives, and a member of the Research & Engineering Advisory Council of the Harvard Institutional Data Initiative. I am also a co-editor of the forthcoming "Debates in DH" volume
Cultures of Scale: Disciplines, Data, Labor .
This website design is inspired by
Space Jam's Website , which has remained
untouched
since 1996. The tiled background is a 100x100 pixel cutout
of a Sloan Digital Sky Survey r-band image of the Globular
Cluster M2 (SDSS run 2583, field 136, camcol 2). I studied
this patch of sky for my undergraduate thesis with
Professor Douglas Finkbeiner
and
Stephen Portillo .