About

Bio

I grew up in the southeast side of San Antonio, Texas and left for Monmouth College, Monmouth, Illinois upon the advice and encouragement of a high school English teacher. Monmouth was a great experience with wonderful professors. I began as a declared double major in English and Computer Science. Then I took a philosophy course and dropped the CS major for a major in philosophy and religious studies. That did not go well with some family members, particularly my grandfather, who sent me many sarcastic but hilarious letters about my decision making capabilities. Still, I don't regret it, and I think he'd be proud of me now.

Some life happened after college, and instead of attending graduate school, I started to work in restaurants full time. I ended up working in about 21 restaurants overall, mostly as a cook but also as a server, bartender, and front manager. I worked in fast food, a diner, a truck stop, a dive bar, a bistro, a steakhouse, various other casual places, and one fine dining Italian restaurant in the Seattle area. I moved around a lot—something like seven states and well over twice as many cities/towns.

Eventually I applied to graduate school and went back to school in the fall of 2007. I worked as a reference librarian and as a cataloger at a small liberal arts college and built a digital library of nearly 40,000 photos for a photojournalism institute. I describe that process at Building the POYi Archive. I intended to work as an academic librarian but was encouraged to apply to the PhD program, which I completed in May 2013.

I started at the University of Kentucky in the fall of 2013. I feel privileged and fortunate to do work as a professor. I feel more fortunate to have my children. I never imagined I'd have such beautiful souls in my life.

Work Info

I currently work as an associate professor of information science at the University of Kentucky, where I teach in the library science (LIS) and the information, communication, and technology (ICT) programs.

More information about my research is available on my research topic page and workflow page, on my CV, and at the following sites:

Site Info

This is a personal website that covers a range of personal and scholarly topics. I intend this site to function as a digital garden, which means I use it as a place for notes, ideas, and projects to grow over time. My writings here are provisional and iterative and are often motivated by curiosity or a need to express myself about something.

Like a real garden, please feel free to wander around and take in what may interest you.

Automating this Website

I wrote what might be called an eccentric bash script to automate site publishing and deploying to The Text, which is a single page of mostly short posts on a range of topics. I describe the beginnings of that script at Site Automation w/ Scripts.

Site Technology

This site uses only HTML and CSS and is coded in /usr/bin/vim, although some posts in The Text are written in /usr/bin/ed.

Outside of being hosted on GitHub, this site does not include any additional analytics.