Teaching

Digital Media: Theory + Practice

New York University, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication

This course offers students a foundational understanding of the technological building blocks that make up digital media & culture, and the ways they come together to shape myriad facets of life. Students will acquire a working knowledge of the key concepts behind coding, and survey the contours of digital media architecture, familiarizing themselves with algorithms, databases, hardware, and similar key components. These technological frameworks will be examined as the basic grammar of digital media & related to theories of identity, privacy, policy, and other pertinent themes. Throughout this course, students will select an ecology to research and engage with using critical digital media skills. The ecology topic must be approved by the instructor in writing and be concerned with a community of being harmed or under ongoing threat of harm in a social, economic, or political context.

New Media Research Studio

New York University, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication

New Media Research Studio is project-based, research-intensive course that explores emerging practices and trends in new media with particular emphasis on digital platforms and how they intersect with data privacy today. Students engage in a semester-long participatory research project using the WordPress platform, Adobe Audition, and Adobe Premiere Pro.

Creative Coding

New York University, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication

“Creative Coding” is a practice-based course designed to teach basic programming skills in the context of critical & cultural media studies & the digital humanities. The course requires no prior programming experience, simply a willingness to explore code at a more technical level with the aim of using computation as an expressive, analytical, critical & visualizing medium. Students will learn basic coding techniques such as variables, loops, graphics, & networking, all within a larger conversation on the social, cultural, & historical nature of code & coding practices.

Methods in Media Studies

New York University, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication

This course introduces students to the methods of analyzing the content, structure, production, and context of media in society. Students learn the basic approaches of textual analysis, political economy, history, and ethnography, developing a familiarity with media criticism and the concepts associated with these approaches. As they adopt, adapt, and employ these frameworks in their own analyses of mediated communication, students will also build media-specific projects using image-editing, visualization, and web-based archival technologies.

Research Projects

Data Visualizations

Where are the rats?

Where are the rodents in NYC? As a New York transplant from the far away land of New Jersey, the presence of rats has been nigh constant since I moved here nine years ago. However, I’ve never gotten the opportunity to study exactly where they are, and which areas of NYC make the highest number of complaints about rodents. Furthermore, I realized that I was particularly interested in how rodents intersected with my education as a recent student in the CUNY school system. With that, my research question evolved; which CUNY school had the highest relationship with rodents?

My audience for this project would be CUNY students, the NYC Sanitation and Animal Control Departments, as well as general NYC residents who may be tired of rodents like I am. With my visualizations, I hope to illustrate where the problem of rats may lie so that we can find out ways to properly address the rodent problem.

Injustice Alert: Mapping Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislation

In wake of the wave of the many bills attacking the LGBTQ+ community in 2023, this site is dedicated to showing which bills are still active so that supporters and advocates have the tools they need to fight them. This project was created in “Free and Open Software for Web Maps” with Prof. Will Field.

Writing

Media Projects

AI Girlfriend Ethics

This podcast was created as a part of the CUNY Graduate Center’s “Data, Culture, and Society” course instructed by Prof. Kevin Ferguson in the Spring 2023 semester. It analyzed Replika and the ethics of their artificial intelligence.