2025-01-20
The TikTok ban and its ongoing aftershocks are significant—not specifically because of the TikTok app and its user communities, but because of what it represents about the current state of the country and the relationship between technology companies, billionaires, and our institutions of government.
Read More...2024-10-01
Academic writing is difficult. Everyone has their own writing processes and strategies for working through the challenges of putting their thinking onto the page. For me, one of the most challenging stages is the jump from ideation phases (e.g. brainstorming and outlining ideas) to an initial draft (full sentences and paragraphs). Once I have some full prose to work with, I have little trouble continuing since it feels like I’m just editing, and not necessarily writing. (Though of course, editing is as much a part of the writing process as writing text on a blank page). But once I’ve written an outline for a piece of writing, it takes considerable mental energy to begin the process of writing the first draft. I ran into this familiar roadblock while working on the conclusion of my dissertation, and I saw this as another opportunity to experiment with using AI as a writing tool.
Read More...2024-07-31
I wrote this blog post for the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research website to describe some of the ongoing "behind-the-scenes" work that I've been doing to keep the Media History Digital Library running as people expect. Sometimes that means working on implementing specific features or optimizing server configurations, but as this example below lays out, it also sometimes entails chasing down obscure issues with how certain metadata is stored.
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