Epistemographer

A bit about me:

I’m 30 years old, recently “returned” to Brooklyn, NY (scare quotes ‘cause I never technically lived there, though I wrote most of my dissertation in a corner of my now-wife’s apartment in Park Slope from 2003-2004). I’m an odd hybrid of humanist and gearhead; I was originally going to be an Electrical Engineer, but was forcibly derailed by a passion for the History of Technology. I did a PhD in Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University and am a theorist of media and technology, but am just as at home writing code as I am writing prose.

The move back to NYC was precipitated by a new job – I’m the first-ever Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship at the New York Public Library. What exactly this entails remains to be played out; what’s clear, though, is that it’s the next step in my trajectory from Project MUSE (while a Hopkins undergraduate) to Cornell’s burgeoning Information Science collective to George Mason’s Center for History and New Media.

This site itself is somewhere between a professional and personal website, which will surprise nobody who knows me and my poor work/life boundaries. The name “epistemographer” (on which I seem to have established a personal monopoly across the online world) comes from one of my graduate school professors (a fine historian of science named Peter Dear), who wrote an article in which he argues that Science Studies is really about charting knowledge; where it comes from, how it’s made, and who’s doing the making. Thus we studied epistemography, which makes me an epistemographer. The name is probably a bit too dorkily academic, but so am I, so everything shakes out alright.