Epistemographer

Hi, I’m Josh.

I’m in my early 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 two and a half 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 at a point of transition 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.