for my collection development class, i participated in a semester-long project analyzing the reference collection at the moma library where i was completing a fellowship at the time.
the project was structured over the semester into several different assignments: first, an exploratory assignment to get a sense of the library, its audience, and its materials, then an acquisition exercise, and a weeding exercise. for our final project, we could explore any topic we wanted within the realm of collection development, and i chose to continue with my moma reference collection analysis, building upon the previous assignments and conducting field research on how other art libraries manage their reference collections. for the weeding exercise, we were asked to analyze 100-200 books from a call number section and use predetermined criteria (crew, mustie) to decide which books to weed. after completing this, i went on to weed about 100 more books to get a true sense of the reference section. i then conducted interviews with reference librarians at the met watson library and the frick library, with a frequent auction house researcher at moma, as well as one with a current moma employee and a former moma fellow who had weeded the reference section previously. i synthesized all of my findings, from physical observation to user research, and delivered a final presentation with both high level and granular recommendations.
i completed this assignment alone.
this project gave me a great sense of collection development practices as a whole. watching the project build upon itself throughout the semester allowed me to see how the practices of weeding, analysis, and acquisition all go hand in hand. throughout the project, i was circling around the question "what is the role of the art reference section in the 21st century?", and this work has given me a broad understanding and appreciation for reference in the digital age.
the second half of my project was primarily concerned with field research, conducting interviews and completing observations of the moma library as well as comparative libraries. i engaged in this research to understand the needs and motivations of both staff and patrons, to ultimately identify how the reference section could be best utilized.
in the spring of 2025, i took professor irene lopatovska's human centered research design course, where we spent the semester planning, designing, executing, and writing a research study about graduate student behaviors and attitudes towards genai tools.
the entire class was extremely collaborative – we began by brainstorming research topics together until we landed on our final question of how graduate students currently use and feel about genai platforms. we wrote our initial survey together, and distributed it out to pratt ischool students. the survey asked what tools students currently used, examples of use cases, and asked them to rate their agreement with certain statements about creative agency, shame, academic integrity, etc. from those responses, we invited certain participants to a focus group, which i helped facilitate. in the focus group, we asked students to draw a representation of how they think genai works, and then talked to them about their drawings. we then asked more questions about usage and attitudes. then, we coded all the interviews and started writing out our findings. i ended up presenting about our work at the pratt infoshow, and contributing to the paper throughout the summer. our paper was published in the information and learning sciences journal in february 2026, and another version of our paper which i worked on just with professor lopatovska and my fellow classmate conor mack was accepted into the information seeking in context conference for 2026.
i worked with my fellow classmates and professor lopatovska on this project, with my main contributions being in facilitating the focus group, presenting at the infoshow, and writing our final paper.
this project allowed me to see an academic research project from beginning to end, and gave me exposure to a plethora of research methods. the project allowed us to understand genai usage in academic contexts as an information environment, and understanding current usage and behavior gave me a broader perspective on how people may engage with these tools going forward.
this project really hit a lot of learning objectives – as a human centered research design course, we were really challenged to think about the user on several levels: firstly, thinking about the user of genai tools, and working to use appropriate questions and methods to better understand their user experience, and secondly, understanding the user within the context of taking our survey and completing our focus group, to make sure that the questions and structure were clear and understandable. i also was thinking about our different perspectives of genai as researchers in this project. it was interesting to hear how the majority of the ixd students in our class were frequent genai users and had generally positive attitudes, whereas the lis students tended to be less frequent users and more pessimistic. being aware of these biases was key for carrying out the research. this project additionally made me more knowledgeable about genai which is a technology that will continue to be important to understand in the field of library science, so i was grateful to dig into the topic for that reason. finally, this project asked me to deal with ethical practice a lot, as we discussed with students their ethical qualms with genai and understood genai's broader impact on society.
for my literature/literacy for teens class, i created a resource blog on using the site builder cargo, that highlighted a variety of books, movies, and websites to introduce teens to cult movies and camp aesthetics.
i began by identifying my target user audience (teenagers) and thinking carefully about what an entry point into cult and camp might look like for someone without prior exposure to either concept. because "teen" encompasses an enormous range of interests, reading levels, and media habits, i structured the blog across multiple formats: books for readers, films for movie-watchers, and websites for the digitally curious, with an orienting "start here" section explaining the blog's purpose and defining key terms in accessible language. rather than assuming any prior knowledge, i wrote annotations and descriptions in a voice that felt direct and conversational without being condescending. this is the tone i would have wanted as a teen discovering these things for the first time. i also made intentional aesthetic choices on cargo to reflect the campy, irreverent sensibility of the content itself, so that the design would signal to teen users what kind of space this was before they even started reading. this playful nature is also an attempt to appeal to the younger user demographic directly.
i was the sole creator of this project.
this project required me to think about teenagers as a specific user community while at the same time not viewing the community as monolithic. teens (and users more broadly) can vary widely in how they prefer to receive information, what media they gravitate toward, and how much background context they need. choosing to present the website as a desktop interface allows the user to engage with a choose your own adventure type format; they can click on the "what is this resource blog?" icon to get more background on the site itself, while they could click on the "what is cult? what is camp?" icon to get background on the content. depending on where they are situated in their knowledge, the user gets to choose. additionally, by offering books, films, and websites as parallel entry points to the same topic, i worked to meet users where they were rather than assuming a single mode of engagement. this was something we learned a lot about in the class as a whole: understanding that as our tech landscape changes, young people's engagement with literacy is going to change as well, and being able to hold both openness and critique about this.
introducing teens to cult and camp required me to think carefully about the ethics of curation. these genres have long histories of transgression, queerness, and outsider identity, and i wanted to honor that legacy without flattening it or making it palatable in ways that stripped out its meaning. i also wanted to honor queer kids as a primary user group of this resource, empowering their self esteem and sense of creative expression, while also making it accessible and open to everyone. selecting resources that were age-appropriate without being sanitized, and that reflected diverse identities and aesthetics within the broader tradition of camp and cult, was an exercise in thinking critically about what gets included and what can get left out. this project was also my first time engaging with the platform cargo, and it was a great exercise in learning about a site building tool that i would absolutely want to utilize in my career going forward.
machine divinity is a research-creation project in which i scraped eschatological and spiritually-coded text from four 4chan message boards (/pol/, /x/, /lit/, and /g/), categorized it according to petersen & baun's typology of conflictual, revelatory, and resignationist eschatologies, and used it to fine-tune three separate language models. the resulting site allows users to interact with three "digital oracles," each one embodying a distinct eschatological voice distilled from the corpus.
i began by collecting thread data using the 4chan public api and cleaning and filtering the corpus using a custom lexicon of religious, occult, metaphysical, and psychosis-coded terminology. i then sorted posts into three eschatological categories, generated sentence embeddings and umap visualizations to explore how these linguistic worldviews clustered, and used each subset to fine-tune a gpt-neo 125m model via huggingface and trl's sfttrainer. i deployed the models through a fastapi backend and built a github pages interface where users can choose an oracle and generate text. the project was developed for my programming for cultural heritage course and draws on scholarship in digital esotericism (asprem, magliocco) and digital subculture studies, as well as my own interest in what machine learning reveals about collective meaning-making in online communities.
i am the sole creator of this project.
the central question animating machine divinity is an ethical one: what does it mean to archive, read, and dwell inside language that wants you gone? dominant information science responses to harmful online speech tend toward documentation, flagging, or removal, which are legitimate professional gestures, but ones that position the information worker as a corrective agent and leave something unexamined. violent and apocalyptic rhetoric online is expressive and structurally coherent to those producing it; it indexes pain and alienation that has not found other forms. this does not make it less harmful. but it suggests that information practices oriented entirely toward suppression may be insufficient responses to a deeper problem. machine divinity proposes a different posture: what i've called archival metabolization. i wanted to fine-tune models on this language because fine-tuning is generative, a different understanding of preservation that gets to the essence of a text and reveals something that is often more uncomfortable than the original. i didn't want to neutralize this language because i didn't want to pretend this language doesn't exist. drawing on donna haraway's concept of affinity politics, i argue that a queer archival ethics might orient itself toward understanding rather than distance, and that staying in the difficulty is a legitimate and necessary information practice. this project also required me to think rigorously about the ethics of non-censorship and transparency. the site includes a dedicated ethics statement, a process page, and clear framing about the project's critical intent, reflecting my belief that research-creation work with harmful content carries an obligation to account for itself openly. the project is not an endorsement of the worldviews it examines; it is an attempt to understand how collective symbolic systems form and what they reveal about the conditions that produce them.
technically, this project required me to learn and apply an end-to-end machine learning pipeline, through api scraping, corpus cleaning, embedding, model fine-tuning, backend deployment, and front-end interface design. it represents a significant expansion of my technical practice. as a research project, it applies and extends an existing scholarly typology (petersen & baun) to a broader, multi-board corpus, situates itself within digital esotericism scholarship, and models a methodology for how lis researchers might engage critically with fringe and harmful online speech rather than only at a remove.
for my growing up digital course, i designed and prototyped odd collage, a hybrid digital-physical art platform for children ages 6–13 where kids can create, upload, remix, print, and share collages in a playful, community-driven environment. the platform is designed for deployment in children's libraries, after-school programs, or school media centers, and pairs with a companion scanner/printer device that allows children to move fluidly between physical and digital making.
the project began as a quick in-class "bag of stuff" prototype developed collaboratively with two classmates, which i then developed into a fully realized digital prototype on my own. i started with informal user research by observing the three-year-old i nanny interact with different digital tools and working with him on canva. this expanded my thinking about the age range the platform could serve and the importance of designing for multiple developmental levels simultaneously. i used resnick's framework of low floors, wide walls, and high ceilings as a guiding design principle throughout: i wanted the platform to be immediately intuitive, open-ended, and forgiving of mistakes. i then planned the full information architecture and designed mockups for four core pages: a main gallery, an upload flow, a print function, and a create page. key design decisions included replacing likes and comments with a community tagging system to avoid replicating the hierarchical social dynamics of mainstream platforms, building in remix and print affordances that link artworks together in a traceable chain (drawing on my familiarity with linked open data principles), and making the create page entirely icon-based to serve the full age range without relying on reading ability.
the final prototype was designed independently, building on an initial collaborative ideation activity.
this project asked me to apply technology design principles for children specifically. every choice had to be evaluated against developmental appropriateness, emotional safety, and accessibility across a wide age range. i drew on constructionist learning theory (papert, resnick) and youth-centered digital well-being research (ito et al., boyd) to ground my design decisions in evidence. the result is a prototype that demonstrates my ability to select and apply tools and design frameworks purposefully.
designing for children ages 6-13 gave me experience designing for a wide range. a six-year-old and a twelve-year-old have radically different reading levels, motor skills, and social needs. my decision to make navigation icon-based, to offer both physical and digital entry points, and to structure the social layer around tagging rather than metrics were all responses to this diversity. the platform had to work across multiple communication modes and serve users with very different relationships to digital tools, which pushed me to think carefully about what "user-centered" actually means when your users can't always articulate their own needs.