I’m currently working as a Staff Engineer with the Democratic National Committee. Formerly I was CTO at Safari, and prior to that I founded a digital publishing company called Threepress, which Safari acquired. My personal projects revolve around machine-generated art, interactive narrative, and digital publishing.
My work centers on playful ways in which machines can augment human creativity, whether it’s in writing poetry, synthesizing photography, appreciating art history or providing new ways to tell stories.
I offer free, private mentorship to women in technical management roles. Please contact me to discuss mentoring options.
A computer-generated book based on the Voynich Manuscript.
Displayed at MIT Libraries as part of Author Function, a 2018 exhibit on computer-generated books. Featured in The Pacific Standard.
Makes a digitized book “physical” by rendering it in a simulated space where properties like gravity, friction, and velocity all apply. Live demo Read more
Creates artwork in the style of Newspaper Blackout Poetry using natural language processing and optical character recognition. Featured on Waxy.org.
Generated compositions that resemble photomontages in the style of early surrealists. Essay on randomness in computer-generated art.
A reimagining of a 1961 computer program that generated the screenplay to a Western, filmed by CBS television. Source code and history of the project. Invited contribution to the Workshop on the History of Expressive Systems:
A series on learning to manipulate text with computers, in five parts:
Harmonia seems like the furthest point we have reached in transforming flat text into a technologically-mediated experience. — Jack Welch
A mystery about writing and dreams of a more perfect world.
I’ve written essays about the marginalia design and the 19th century utopian fiction that inspired the story. Harmonia was created using the Windrift story engine. Source code. Coverage and interview in Atlas Obscura.
3th place in the 2017 Interactive Fiction Competition.
An interactive detective story, playable in a web browser. Interview about the development of the piece with Emily Short. Source code.
4th place, 2016 Interactive Fiction Competition, and finalist for three 2016 XYZZY Awards including Best Writing.
“A marvel—an exploration of the space between the mind and the page the likes of which I’ve never experienced.” — Kotaku
An interactive epistolary story I commissioned from Emily Short. I worked on the design and implementation with inkle (80 Days, Sorcery!)
Best Use of Innovation, 2013 XYZZY Awards.
CC Search indexes a corpus of over 10 million publicly licensed images from museums, libraries, and individuals, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Europeana, and the New York Public Library. Coverage: Newsweek and TechCrunch. My technical notes published in Hacker Noon.
Label This!, for University of California, Davis, helps users explore and describe the library’s remarkable collection of historic wine labels. Based on scribeAPI, a Rails/React webapp that allows visitors to select and transcribe areas of interest on digitized material.
Generates abstract color tiles after Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s 1902 work on color theory.
Finds tweets with inspirational-sounding messages and mis-attributes them to famous people like Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln.
Picks a recipe, parses its ingredients, and makes random (usually revolting) substitutions, just like people who comment on internet recipes.
What makes for successful digital-first literature: it must be immersive, non-trivial, and participatory.
Covering embedding JavaScript and other forms of interactivity into EPUB 3 publications.
A tutorial for IBM Developerworks on using CSS3 media query, HTML5 navigation, and MathML in EPUB 3 publications.
A report prepared for the UK academic funding organization JISC on digital publishing, ebooks, and scholarly communication.
Interview for Atlas Obscura along with other Interactive Fiction Competition winners and organizers (Nov, 2017).
Podcast interview with Harvard Business Publishing on artificial intelligence and machine learning for publishers (Oct, 2017)
Photoessay and interview in Topic about mentorship relationships among women (Aug, 2017)
Podcast interview for Moonshot on AI and machine learning (July, 2017)
Interview about the relationship between interactive fiction and AI, featuring Emily Short, Lynnea Glasser, and Bruno Dias (Nov, 2016)
Strategies to help introverts network (FastCompany, 2015)
Ebooks in the cloud (Wired, 2011)
Interview on “digital detox” (NYT, 2010)