About
Hi, I'm Josh.
I'm in my 30's and live the Brooklyn cliche with a spouse/toddler, a european stroller, a deep affection for design and a job that straddles the worlds of culture and technology. Oh, and I like food, cocktails and all things culinary. A lot.
Professionally, 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 completed 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. At least, I used to be - haven't written much actual code for a little while, though I can still speak it fluently.
Currently, I'm the first-ever Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship at the New York Public Library. For the past three years, I've been coordinating the overall turning of the NYPL battleship as relates to digital technology; this has mainly meant focusing on new platforms and infrastructure (a new website, a digital repository, new kinds of staff expertise and working relationships); now that much of that work is in place I'm trying to figure out what the next set of challenges will be.
As for the site you're reading, it's 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 & Technology 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.