CV
Curriculum Vitae
[pdf]
Research Statement [pdf]
Teaching Statement [pdf]
Research Interests
I am interested in the intersection of cognition, culture, philosophy and technology. My current research is focused on understanding information system ontologies as emergent cultural schemas through the manifestations of folksonomies and the use of tags, something that I am calling schematic ontologies. I am also involved with research related to the inter-organizational and intercultural coordination of technologies by humanitarian relief agencies and in developing visualization techniques that foster intercultural understanding among agencies, clients, governments, and others involved in humanitarian efforts.
Information Integration
The ability to understand and integrate a multiplicity of schematic ontologies will become an essential component of our human response to the global climate crisis. In a planetary context, information about the effects of climate change will come from a diverse array of sources, filtered and structured according to a diverse array of cultural schemas. Schematic ontologies will help to facilitate this information integration through better semantic interoperability.
Social Media & Semantics
The emergence of social bookmarking websites have allowed for the creation of folksonomies as alternatives to expert-created taxonomies. Through the introduction of culture to information science, and hence folksonomies, my research will open new avenues of research into tags and the tagging process. It will introduce a way for researchers to disaggregate folksonomies into tag sets specific to cultural groups, thereby allowing them to disambiguate the semantics of tags through the use of cultural schemas. It may lead to the modification of tagging systems such that they specifically include cultural information about the taggers or all researchers to devise ways of collecting already extent cultural information available elsewhere.
Knowledge Representation and Visualization
Like the cultural schemas we develop through our being-in-the-world, schematic ontologies would be constantly evolving, allowing for a Gadamerian fusion of horizons and the integration of information across domains, ultimately fulfilling the promise of interoperability among our machines and information systems. In other words, schematic ontology representations, structured and visualized using information systems, would provide the foundation for the beginnings of hermeneutic discourse involving varying cultural perspectives around a phenomenon of interest.
Information Ethics
Achieving ontological interoperability among our machines and information systems requires cultural understanding. Entwined with the cultural background in which our conceptual ontologies are situated are ethical frameworks and schematics that our machines will also have to use. The question of how we define or characterize these ethics with respect to information and how we create the ability for our machines to choose among the frameworks of virtue, consequentialism, deontology, and feminist/care ethics as appropriate to the context becomes more important as our machines become more autonomous. Increasingly important will become the ontocentric ethical framework of Information Ethics proposed by Luciano Floridi.
Education
Ph.D. • Information Sciences and Technology • Penn State University • State College, PA • Expected 2010
M.A. • Intercultural Relations • Lesley University • Cambridge, MA • 2003
B.A. • Psychology and Philosophy • Northwestern University • Evanston, IL • 1986
