I'm a Teaching Professor and former Director of the Writing Program at UC Santa Barbara, where I teach courses in new media and digital composing and direct the Multimedia Communication track of the Professional Writing Minor. I'm also an Associate Dean in the Division of Undergraduate Education.
Information design in print media; focus on grammatical and rhetorical expertise. Project-based course with a focus on understanding the intersections of writing and visual design. Major project is a brand style guide.
Creation of digital work using software and coding. The major project is the design and production of a professional website, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, WordPress, and other tools. Focus on developing effective design and communication skills within a digital environment.
A course focused on analyzing and creating multimedia compositions. Projects in the Summer 2018 course approached data collection, analysis, and visualization from a variety of perspectives. The students did amazing work.
This is a project-based course in which students create a website or blog on a subject of their choice. They define topic and audience, learn key characteristics of effective web writing and design, and create a multimedia, interactive, engaging website or blog using WordPress.
In 10 weeks, students learn enough HTML and CSS to be able to modify a website template and make it their own. The website can be used for academic, professional, and personal work. We also cover strategies for designing sites that are responsive on different devices, accessible to a range of users, and rhetorically effective in conveying content.
Some recent and ongoing work.
I wrote several articles on data visualization during the COVID-19 pandemic. I was interested in how non-experts used the data dashboards that proliferated during the pandemic; in how anthropomorphic visualizations might impact users' understanding of COVID-19 data; and in how visualization and interactivity were used in narratives about the pandemic.
This webtext, published in Kairos and co-written with my former student Austin Fauni, discusses a Dear Data project that I did in a Summer 2018 section of Writing 105M.
I wrote an article on how to understand information visualizations, with particular reference to Dollar Street. The article was published in Computers and Composition Volume 54, December 2019.
I'm interested in typography, text/image combinations, and text visualization.
Below are just a few of the very best resources that I use in my courses.
I've taken thousands of photos of Sophia during her 18-ish years on this earth and in my life. It turns out that from every angle she's perfect.
