About Me (as a human)
I’m queer, and I’m Asian, so you know there’s gonna be certain kinds of headaches cooking in the background. I do my research in social movement arts and public wall arts, and I’m catching up with my fair share of feminist and anti-racist education. I do lots of visual and graphic designs and film stuffs, too, although I’m no professional. I’m a beginner Tarot teller, a half-baked street photographer, an INFJ, a casual otaku, and a Final Fantasy XIV player if you know of the critically acclaimed MMORPG (know that meme).
Pronouns: he/they, or any pronoun used with kindness.
Things I Read
It’s a mix. My past and current advisors have rightfully pointed out that I took too many classes outside SILS and not enough in SILS, and I’m working on that.
My background is a mix of computer science, film studies, media studies, and art history–that means some math and coding, plus tons of core humanities readings: Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Stuart Hall, Susan Sontag, Lauren Berlant, and so on. As for more core LIS literatures… I’ll tell you the names when I’m confident spelling them. Just to list some recent writings, I’m reading Marika Cifor’s and Michelle Caswell’s works on community archives and critical archival studies.
And, totally unrelated to my research, I read lots of manga. Recently finished Our Dreams at Dusk (しまなみ誰そ彼) by Kamatani Yuuki (鎌谷悠希) and I can wholeheartedly recommend that. I’m also reading her new series Hiraeth: The End of the Journey (ヒラエスは旅路の果て). Another ongoing series I’m really in love right now is a poetic surreal slice-of-life series called Shimeji Simulation (シメジ シミュレーション) by Tsukumizu (つくみず).
Works I Do
Probably like many of you I hustle a lot (pay us better!). I did my RA with Dr. Sayamindu Dasgupta, and now I’m TAing for INLS 201. I also did a fellowship with Dance/USA and Charya Burt Cambodian Dance Company on dance archiving. And I also worked in NYU Libraries Scholarly Communications Office, and UC Berkeley Media Resources Center. And even before those I was a dining hall server. None of that pays as much as a real job, not even adding them all up, let me warn y’all. And that doesn’t even count any unpaid job.
Speaking of the dance archive fellowship, this is what I did this over the summer of 2022, and both the dance company people and I are pretty proud of it. I want y’all to check out the technical infra I co-built, and also know their amazing dance work: https://charyaburt.com/library-homepage/. I also really recommend you check out Dance/USA’s archiving and preservation fellowship.
Next up I hope to work with a few people from SILS, Geography, and Art History for some even more interesting database/digital humanities piece. That’s being cooked right now.
Work Skills & Research Methods I Use
I have picked up a bit of everything, probably like many hustlers: paper writing, slides making, programming, teaching, course prepping, database design, website design, graphic design, video/photo editing, scriptwriting… roughly in decreasing importance.
Skills that may be of particular interest for academic work: taxonomy & vocabulary development, Airtable relational database (can also pick up things like SQL), digitization & digital transfer, python & ipython notebook programming, some node.js and plain HTML programming, Android programming (a good while ago), a few API tools for platforms like Vimeo and Google Cloud, basic data analysis and visualization using Stata.
As for research tools, I write a lot in arts and humanities, so formal and narrative analyses are still in my toolkit. I have also designed interviews and workshops, and I’m learning to do fieldworks in traditional ethnography and digital media ethnography.
Communities I Belong
CITAP and Femifesto are the two big ones. The former one is the high-visibility research center that you probably have seen or will see anyways. The latter is a loose but very welcoming group of librarians (mostly in scholarly communication), and I got involved from my previous work at NYU Libraries. And of course I’m working with DSA people here. I’m not in a lab or any specific research group, though.