My career has been defined by showing that the apparent gap between computational logic and human emotional expression instead reveals a fundamental link: coded, compact human expression. Through my investigations of material and conceptual networks of medieval textual production, I have become increasingly oriented toward computational methods and interdisciplinary collaboration. As a scholar with an integrated profile in Old and Middle English, manuscript studies, and the digital humanities, I ground humanistic inquiry in the technical literacies many students already possess.
==//==
My teaching philosophy rests on the supposition that humans remain relatively stable in the face of technological shifts—and that it is my responsibility to teach them not how to be a new kind of human but to be delightedly human in environments often hostile to that delight. I develop courses that explicitly address the clash of disciplinary intuitions, teaching students how to articulate expertise and the instincts of expertise for their collaborators—essential for effective teamwork between literary scholars, linguists, and computer scientists.
My teaching is shaped by the belief that computational techniques give humanists effective tools to solve problems they can well articulate. By thinking about documents as designed objects and language as variously capable of compression, I help students develop practical skills (e.g. what is a paragraph designed to do?) and metacognitive awareness (e.g. what tools do I use to determine a writer's motivation?) essential to interpreting a wide range of documents. My teaching is driven by a commitment to fostering a rapid and lasting sense of belonging that affirms students not in spite of their backgrounds, but because of them. Design and UX/UI students often remark that our discussion of Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things—which we use to explore the affordances of verbal technologies—prepares them to engage more deeply with their major courses. CS students similarly value readings on the philosophy of coding: the DRY Principle (Don't Repeat Yourself) as a method for designing efficient papers, and orthogonality (independence of unrelated components) for structuring effective paragraphs.
I teach that poetry emphasizes structure and highly compressed language. Since compression is one of poetry's primary characteristics—it is, in a sense, communication condensed—it serves as a highly effective tool for teaching composition and efficiency. I have developed and offered twelve iterations of "Poetry for Programmers," which integrates formal poetics with the philosophy of computer science. From the first class we look at a poem by Pittsburgh poet Cameron Barnett where the stanzas begin with 1 or 0 in an apparently random order. In each section I have taught, one CS student suddenly realizes the sequence is ASCII binary for "I"—the very thing the speaker says he could only manage to write. The whole poem is a sort of code that produces the speaker's self as they read. After contextualizing with historical readings about the Jacquard loom and woven RAM on the Apollo module, I show students that computation is not just a method of analysis but, like meter, is a very human activity. This opening lesson demonstrates that knowledge of binary has interpretive importance in contemporary poetic compositions, and that complex decision-making is similarly the result of a long series of small binary decisions.
Combining technical skills with an interpretive mindset is essential to distinguish propaganda from promise and hallucinations from meaningful analysis in an increasingly AI-driven world. My research on the impact of Glyph Machina's output for Large Language Models builds curricula on ethical AI development and historical data bias—examining how data collection from historically thin or skewed corpora affects the accuracy of LLM output. My work involves a field-defining Handwritten Character Recognition (HCR) model, utilizing CNNs connected to LSTMs in PyTorch.
My courses have been named in campus tours as positively engaging students' chosen majors. A mechanical engineering student wrote: "I gained more from this course than I ever would have expected from a mandatory first year college course. The improvement I observed in my ability to effectively analyze and digest texts, especially poetry, was remarkable for such a short period of time." A statistics/machine learning major: "I spent 7 years in a creative writing program and I think I appreciate poetry more now than I ever did during that." Two students from "Poetry for Programmers" have had papers selected for publication by the undergraduate writing journal. I have mentored students who learned Unity to write video games engaging medieval literature, developed ML models to predict food shortages, and critically implemented AI tools in research projects.
==//==
In this course, students will read ancient and modern poetry with at least three aims: 1. What stories do poems tell? 2. How do the formal features of the poems make them operate? 3. How can those features be modeled? Students will learn the history and operation of linguistic strategies like metaphor, rhyme, and alliteration. Readings may include selections from Pope, Walcott, Sappho, Robert Hayden, Marianne Moore, Homer, and investigations into contemporary working poets. We'll also apprehend some critical conversations of literary analysis: how race and poetics interact, how formal features shape thought, and how canonicity factors into form. We'll also look at the elements that coding shares with poetic language—from the existence of coding languages to terms like concatenation, compilation, for loops—to consider how studying the formal features of poetic composition can additionally inform human-computer interaction and how coding knowledge can inform and expand forms of poetic analysis.
Students will learn select critical theory and its application, write formal and argumentative essays. Opportunities to experiment with poetic composition, generative projects, and companion coding will abound as well.
Is hunger a feeling? Is it a physical state? How much of our human activity is oriented around preventing hunger? How does hunger also reveal inequality? How do desire and appetite relate to hunger? Is hunger a positive state or a lack of food? We'll discuss how hunger plays an important role in our lives, in our communities, and how we can develop a coherent approach to questions of hunger and how developing such an approach can transform the way we interact with our goals, our communities, and even parts of ourselves. As early as the middle ages, poets divided society into 'winners,' i.e. producers and 'wasters,' i.e. consumers. In recent years, hunger provides a locus for social commentary in Tommy Pico's poetry and Roxane Gay's memoirs. And the problem is local, too: Pittsburgh has the highest levels of food insecurity among similarly-sized cities. Nearly 1 in 5 residents of Pittsburgh live in food insecurity – a much higher rate than national rates. In this 'foodie city' in one of the most stupendously wealthy countries in the world, why are people going hungry? In this course, students will begin to answer these questions through a variety of individual and collaborative research projects. Students will learn to analyze texts for their arguments, synthesize their ideas, and learn the skills needed to participate in a scholarly conversation. After reading and analyzing a variety of arguments on this issue, students will write a formal research proposal and paper by drawing upon their knowledge from this class and their own disciplines.
This course shifts the focus from "nature" as a site of generation to its perception as interference in human decision making, love, and happiness. Storms arise and magic abounds in Sir Orfeo, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, and selections from Milton's Paradise Lost will cycle back to Genesis. We'll end by examining lost love and frustration in the natural world with selections from Wordsworth's Preludes, Byron's "Darkness," Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, Jos Charles's Feeld, Tommy Pico's Feed, and Robin Wall Kimmerer's Gathering Moss.
We're in a strange position in relationship to nature these days – the median American farm is not economically self-sustaining, we have national parks pristinely preserved for the middle to upper classes and pollution on a massive scale in the places that we live. Lawn grass is our primary crop, we make it useless with pesticides, and foragers and gardeners are considered niche and kooky. Meanwhile, we have massive changes and ensuing disagreements worldwide about sexuality – what is 'natural,' what is 'good,' and what forms of human sexuality ought to be politically punished or protected. We're not even begin to solve these problems or even circumscribe them, but it's the setting in which we'll look at some of the oldest extant written stories, from medieval literature and philosophy, all of which are strongly attuned both to eros and to the natural world in which they live.
In this course, students will read the creation accounts from Gilgamesh, the Qur'an, Genesis, and Hesiod's Theogeny. From these accounts of clay to flesh, we'll turn to Ovid's mythologies of deified streams and rivers, their offspring, and how the marriage of the divine and the dirt yields human beings in the ancient world. In Genesis, the natural world provides temptations, and in Song of Songs, the fruit for erotic metaphor as it does for hundreds of years in the poems of Rumi and medieval English lyrics. The first semester will end in the Middle Ages, where a green warrior spawned, it seems, from the natural world itself provides terrifying ethical and sexual ambiguities in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
In this course, trans-historical accounts of sleeping from the ancient world to now and theories of dreaming will serve as the frame for the dream-visions of the Middle Ages and contemporary tales of insomnia, including Piers Plowman, Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale, Pearl as well as Cashback, Taxi Driver, La science des rêves, After Dark, Fight Club, In Search of Lost Time, Sleep, Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov, and many more. Do these stories have something in common? What do the dreams of the Middle Ages have to teach us about our own sleepless age? What can we do with the liminal space between waking and sleeping – is it a waste of life or a door to another world?
We'll split time in this course between medieval literature written in Old English and Middle English and films produced within the last few decades. All the works we'll study involve dreaming and/or not sleeping – I've paired them in part because these are two artistic (sub?)genres I find particularly interesting. More than that, I have wondered about the strange resonances between the late Middle Ages and postmodernity – we'll be together on the front lines of figuring whether that resonance is incidental or substantial. By the end of the course, I want you to have an initial sense of what medieval dream-visions are and are doing and a sense for the role of insomnia in those visions as well as the modern visions portrayed in films.
Since Nero squinted through gems to watch gladiators die, artificial lenses have changed the way we see the world; 'the lens' is a common metaphor used to compare ideologies or to interpret art with a philosophy. This course will investigate how lenses came about and how the widespread presence of lenses (in cameras, the eye) started to shape the world around us. We'll consider the implications of privileging vision over hearing and touch; explore the strangeness of lenses, which distort in order to clarify; read ancient, medieval, and modern accounts of lens-making and use, fiction in which a lens or camera is particularly relevant, philosophy and theory which examines lenses, and study films and photographs with the insights gained along the way.
Much is expected of you, college freshmen. Amidst the expectations for gaining future employment, appearing successful, and forming community, it can be easy to lose a sense of place. This class, in its humble way, is designed to provide some of that sense by answering two questions: "What is an intellectual life?" and "How does someone develop one?". Students who are willing to think seriously and earnestly are invited to participate; ideally, a wide variety of majors will attend. The focus of the class is on the arts: paintings, sculpture, literature, film, photography, and music will all be objects of engagement, with special emphasis on literature, essays, and film.
Athletic contests have served as symbols, stories, and structure for nearly as long as literature has been written down. From the Olympic champions Pindar set among the gods to the Aeneid's boat races to Henry V's tennis metaphor to David Foster Wallace's essays to the Psalms to the old baseball-loving pastor of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and the broken bodies of B.H. Fairchild's Midwest outfielders, sports serve up striking images, memorable characters, and intensely emotional moments.
In this class, we'll read works entire and excerpted, literature, essays, and theory all focusing on athletes or analogies of sport. We'll ask questions about the relationship of athleticism and literature, those who write and those who play.
As you may have noticed, this class is titled 'strategies in rhetoric and research' which accurately implies that we will be concerning ourselves closely with both rhetoric and research. Before we can have strategies at all, let alone advanced strategies, we'll need to find out what rhetoric and research are, what they involve, and how they are used in a variety of contexts. With this in mind, you will work in several media, several formats of those media, and choosing the best presentation for the rhetorical task at hand. What will this look like? You'll be blogging, writing, perhaps vlogging, and speaking, all before audiences and all focusing around a single area of concern.
Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to demonstrate:
The goal of this class, briefly, is that you all take steps toward becoming eloquent human beings.
==//==
Encrypt or decrypt text with a visual cipher inspired by encryptionpoem. Enter your text and a password.
==//==
Randomly reduce and lineate text into verse, inspired by poem-frankensteiner. Enter source text and choose how much to keep.
==//==
Drop a bibliography, compile citation and social maps, read coverage and synthesis, and ask questions over your corpus—in the browser. Source: research-party on GitHub.
Open research-party.com in a new tab if the embed is slow or blocked.
==//==
Ph.D., Medieval Literature 2022
Dissertation: "Rewrite this Book: Compilation and Experimental Literary Practices in Piers Plowman and Late Medieval English Book Culture"
M.A., Medieval Literature 2019
M.A., English 2016
Thesis: "Double Vision: Piers Plowman and the Medieval Miscellany"
B.A., Classics and English Literature 2012
Researcher · Carnegie Mellon University
Lecturer – Writing and Communications · Pittsburgh, PA
Joseph F. Martino '53 Lecturer in Undergraduate Teaching · Ithaca, NY
Instructor of Record · Ithaca, NY
Instructor of Record · St. Louis, MO
Creator & Developer · Pittsburgh, PA
Co-Founder · Pittsburgh, PA
Department Coordinator · Pittsburgh, PA
Chair and Co-Founder · Pittsburgh, PA
Medievalist & Technical Liaison · Remote
Co-Founder · Ithaca, NY
Co-Founder · St. Louis, MO
Open-source software for manuscript and print workflows—OCR, diplomatic transcription, type-case sizing, bibliography analysis, and visual Page XML editing. Descriptions drawn from each project’s GitHub README.
Turns historical sources into document.txt / minimal TEI: URL or IIIF fetch, PDF page images, print OCR (Tesseract), protocol YAML → text. Optionally delegates manuscript transcription to transcription-shell and type-case fingerprinting to typebox-fingerprinter.
Pre-cropped page image → lines.xml (default: Glyph Machina in the browser; Kraken or mask backends optional) → LLM with the transcription-protocol prompt → validated _transcription.yaml. Desktop GUI or CLI batch.
Letter-height and book-level sizing tool for early English print: Kraken line segmentation, height-ratio filtering (≥ 0.55× median line height), 14 distributional sizing channels (glyph height, ink area, aspect ratio, leading, …), then ResNet glyph-encoder matching to attribute imprints to physical type cases via Print & Probability.
GitHub · CLI: typebox-fingerprinter
Drop a bibliography; compile an inspectable pack with roles, coverage, citation context, and exports. 3D/2D maps are exploratory lenses on that data—not the analysis itself. Integrates bib-ocr for PDF citation ingest; Explore mode for Q&A over your pile.
Interactive ground-truth editing on manuscript images: Page XML, omni:us / PRImA, ALTO v2/v3, TET, Poppler import; desktop (NW.js) and web-app variants with live feedback. Maintained for the Glyph Machina workflow, including Latin abbreviation expansion via expand-diplomatic.
CV source: cv-tools.tex — LaTeX fragment to \input{} into your Alt CV.
Faculty · New York, NY