About
My name is David Saab and djsaab.info is my personal infospace. Here, you will find ongoing posts related to my research and study as a PhD student in IST at Penn State University. IST is an interdisciplinary field and fits well with my experience. My research focuses on the nexus of cognition, culture and technology. I am particularly interested in ontologies as reflections of cultural schemas, connectionist networks, metaphors, information visualization, philosophy of information, and research methodologies.
I can be reached at djsaab@djsaab.info
or djsaab@gmail.com.
You’ll also find my academic vita, my master’s thesis, and the research projects on which I currently work.
I did a double major as an undergrad at Northwestern. I would have also obtained a certificate in Science in Human Culture had I not had to drop a class because of a family emergency. I joined the Peace Corps in the Marshall Islands and extended my service for another thirteen months to work on a project that I’d developed and which was funded by the Australian government. I ended up staying in the Marshall Islands a total of eight years. Upon returning to the US in 1995, I entered a master’s program in Intercultural Relations and took up the challenge of writing a thesis, which was optional and not required for the degree. A few months after putting my thesis online, I received an email from Fred Fonseca asking me if I was interested in pursuing a PhD. A year after Fred’s initial email, while visiting my friend, Mark, in Uganda, I received email notification that I’d been accepted into the PhD program in IST at Penn State.
I’m an avid traveler. I enjoy immersing myself in other cultures. I’ve had the opportunity to travel in Australia/Oceania, Asia, Europe, North America, and Africa. I’ll eventually get to South America and, if I’m lucky, Antarctica.
I’ve always been interested in personality and cognition. Perhaps that’s why I became a psychology major as an undergrad. I also learned as an undergrad the limitations of various psychological tests and measures–they can never explain the whole person, only give glimpses into various slices of him. Even so, I find personality tests intriguing insofar as they are able to describe patterns and general tendencies for particular people. I offer some links here for those interested in how I think or what type of person I am. While not wholly accurate, there is some truth to each of these profiles, assuming my assessment is more than mere wishful thinking.
My Personality
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Kiersey Temperament Sorter
INTP
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Astrological
Aquarius
