Who Am Us, Anyway?

Currently—a freelance "User Experience professional" (or whatever this week's fashionable term for the profression of making software and websites more useful, usable, and desirable happens to be; personally, I am fond of Ted Nelson's "systems humanist") operating in the Greater Philadelphia area.

Previously—a frequent passenger on Amtrak's Northeast Regional while completing a graduate certificate in Information Design at the University of Baltimore.

Even more previously—a habitué of institutions of higher education, professionally as an instructional technologist (at Morehead State University and The Ohio State University), pre-professionally as a scholar of literature and hypertext (at the University of Georgia), and academically as a student of Anglo-Irish liteature (Trinity College, Dublin) and the humanities (Yale). If that progression sounds unlikely in retrospect, it seemed even moreso when it was happening.

For nearly two decades—a believer in the power of information to change lives for the better and in the power of technology to make information more accessible and understandable for everyone. I have been tinkering with the web and things web-like since the days of Lynx and 1200 baud dial-up connections. I have seen fads come and go, bubbles inflate and burst. What endures, what keeps me coming back is the promise of an Internet that functions as, in Nelson's words, a "waterworks for the mind" (Literary Machines 93.1, p. 1/13).

A more exhaustive catalog of my previous activities is available for those who enjoy such things..