publications:

Master's thesis in Anthropology
Advisor: Elizabeth Traube

The Virtual Campfire: An Ethnography of Online Social Networking explores the increasingly blurred boundaries between human and machine, public and private, voyeurism and exhibitionism, the history of media and our digitized future. Woven throughout are the stories and experiences of those who engage with these sites regularly and ritualistically, the generation of "digital natives" whose tales attest to the often strange and uncomfortable ways online social networking sites have come to be embedded in the everyday lives of American youth.

recent essays:

• Winter 2011. "Re-Imagining the 'Global Village' in an Age of Networked Materiality: Designing Online Spaces for Group Coordination, Participation, and Collaboration"
  ¬ cogsci 220: information visualization - course wiki page
  ¬ project progress


• Spring 2010. "Reimagining Community in an Age of Networked Materiality (or: after the apocalypse: the undergrowth and the thrivival of the neotribes)"
  ¬ Conducted field research on engagement with new media at the Fifth Dimension site in Solana Beach, an afterschool program for informal learning for predominantly Mexican-American children.


• Spring 2010. "Toward a Spirit of Experimentation: Virtual Ethnography and the Technomadic Anthropologist"


• Spring 2010. "Development, Cognition, and the Role of Objects"


• Winter 2010. "The Evolution of Online Communities: A Critique and Possible Future"


• Winter 2010. "Border-Crossing: Structure and Agency in the Formation of Nations, Publics, Citizens and Markets"


• Fall 2010. "A Genealogy of Literacy From Plato to Twitter"



undergraduate research:

• Online Social Networks as Vehicles for Individual and Collective Remembrance
  Grounding the Past: Monument, Site, and Historical Memory with Phil Wagoner, Fall 2007

• Being, Knowing, and Being Known on the Facebook
  Qualitative Research Methods in Psychology with Rachael Russell, Fall 2006

• The Trance Dance Experience
  Anthropology of Dance with Katja Kolcio Fall 2006

• Bridging the Virtual and the Real: Identity and Community on the Facebook
  Youth Culture with Elizabth Traube, Spring 2006

• Eating Disorder Communities On The Web
  Seminar in Eating Disorders with Ruth Striegel-Moore, Spring 2006