About

Bio

I grew up in the southeast side of San Antonio, Texas. I 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 worked in restaurants full time. Over the years, I worked 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. Sometimes I took second jobs, like working part time as a janitor at a YMCA. 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 Bio

I 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.

Like a real garden, please feel free to wander around and take in what may interest you. Sometimes you might find weeds, too.

Colophon

I automate publishing to The Text using a simple bash script. The script is composed of shell commands and sed and ed functions. It converts Markdown files/posts to HTML, inserts the HTML posts into WWW/index.html, and updates the WWW/index.xml RSS feed. The bash script is intentionally a bit eccentric. I describe the evolution of that script at Site Automation w/ Scripts.

I wrote the remainder of this site either in Markdown, converted to HTML using pandoc, or HTML. The CSS stylesheet is also handcrafted and is subject to change often.

This site uses only HTML and CSS and is coded in /usr/bin/vim. Some posts in The Text are written in /usr/bin/ed. This site uses zero JavaScript.

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