Projects

Initiatives

I am involved in several research initiatives at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign related to my interests in Science and Technology Studies (STS), Interactive Digital Narrative, Conversational AI, Collaborative Authoring, and Digital Inclusion.

  • The Electronic Literatures and Literacies Lab (EL3) is a cross-campus community supported by the Illinois Informatics Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which brings together authors, programmers, game designers, artists, and interdisciplinary researchers from the Humanities, Fine Arts, Social Sciences and STEM to collaborate in the fostering and study of emerging media, including interactive digital narratives, immersive simulations, and socially transformative games.
  • The Illinois Map is a digital learning environment, envisioned as both a classroom resource (an educational game), and a pedagogical tool (a coding workshop). It is designed to foster programming literacy while promoting intercultural/ interracial empathy through play.

Books in Progress

  • The Suggestible Self: Hypnosis, social networks, and the media of power.
  • Coding the Whole Wide World: A guide to the collaborative authoring of interactive literature and historical simulations.

Multimodal Work in Progress

  • The Feast of Saint Blaise — a novel-length digital interactive narrative based on my PhD dissertation.
  • Nothing So Fair — digital re-release of stories published in The Halved Soul in combination with compositions recorded in Changes Like the Moon, a digital recreation of the original storytelling and musical performances.

Articles & Chapters in Progress

  • “The appeal of an endless horizon: Collaborative authorship as meta-interactive play.”
  • “Spitting cousins: Computer-mediated kinship and practices of privacy in online genetic genealogy.”
  • “The problem of innocence: Suicide in the films of Vinko Brešan, Goran Paskaljević, and Pjer Žalica.”
  • “And that river we must cross.” In Ida Fadzillah, Judith Pintar and Maria Tapias (Eds.), Granddaughters in the Field: Reflections on Family History & the Ethnographic Calling.