Notice
This site is currently maintained for archive purposes.
It contains some of my writings up to around 2014, the year I started working for the School of Data Science at UVA, then the Data Science Institute.
It is an artifact of its time, before social media and generative AI transformed the landscape of the Web from what many of us perceived to be an open and collaborative space for alt-academic writing to a collection of closed platforms designed to monetize attention, extract behavioral data, and influence human behavior on a scale only dreamed of by pharaohs and kings.
I don’t think the era of the blog is over, though. There is still a place, both technically and politically, for people to contribute their thoughts on dedicated websites — domains of one’s own, to use the old edupunk phrase — that can be cited, linked, and networked in the old way.
As for my recent work, I currently divide my attention between three areas: (1) the history and philosophy of data science; (2) a critical engagement with technologies of language — natural language processing, language modeling, and text mining; and (3) the development of a corpus of indigenous Mesoamerican texts, including new editions of the Popol Wuj. Regarding large language models, I am interested in how these can be understood from a sociolinguistic perspective as well as how the may benefit the study and preservation of indigenous languages.
I expect to post my thoughts and outputs from these endeavors on a newer blog.