I’m a professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where I teach and research at the intersection of writing, rhetoric, technology, and digital culture. I’ve spent much of my career trying to understand what happens to writing when the tools, platforms, and communities around it change. Broadly, I’m interested in how technologies shape the ways people write, learn, communicate, and participate in knowledge-making.
That work has led me to explore Wikipedia, generative AI, and many topics in between. I’ve been a Wikipedian and Wikimedia educator since 2011, and Wikipedia remains a major part of my scholarly and teaching life. I’ve taught students to research and write for Wikipedia, worked with educators and Wikimedia organizations, and studied the ways Wikipedia shapes what becomes visible as knowledge online. My book, Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality, coauthored with Zachary McDowell, examines the people, policies, technologies, and assumptions that shape one of the world’s most important sources of public knowledge.
More recently, my research has turned toward artificial intelligence and writing. I’m interested in what happens when systems such as ChatGPT become part of the writing process, and in the larger questions that follow: How do these systems change the ways we think and compose? What happens to authorship and creativity when writing becomes increasingly collaborative with machines? How should teachers respond? And what happens to our shared knowledge when the same digital commons that humans have built become training material for AI systems? My recent research examines these questions through studies of students’ writing practices, AI ethics, authorship, creativity, and the changing relationship between human writers and generative systems.
I’m also interested in the practical side of these questions. My teaching and research often involve building things with other people: Wikipedia assignments, open educational resources, collaborative research projects, workshops, digital archives, and new approaches to studying writing. I’m a series editor for Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, an open-access collection of peer-reviewed writing about writing, and I’ve worked with educators to develop ways of bringing Wikipedia, open pedagogy, and emerging technologies into writing classrooms. I’m particularly drawn to projects that give students and communities more agency over the technologies and knowledge systems they use.