Team

André Brock is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. He writes on Western technoculture and Black cybercultures; his scholarship examines race in social media, video games, blogs, and other digital media. His book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (NYU Press 2020), which theorizes Black everyday lives mediated by networked technologies, was recently named by The Verge as one of the “Top Tech Books of All Time.” It is also the 2021 winner of the Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies and the 2021 Nancy Baym Book Award.

Anhton Tran is a PhD Candidate and in Human Centered Computing at Georgia Tech. He earned his MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons School of Design. His practice is based in design-led research, participatory engagement, and ethnography to interrogate systems. His current work unpacks the intricacies of eviction data and the labor involved making them open and useful to grassroot efforts. Anhton’s work has been recognized at Milan Design Week, Design Biotop, and the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Anhton’s research investigates the generation of an eviction record to trace all of the ways these public records are put into use as data. He has worked with the housing activist non-profit, Housing Justice League, for three years supporting data-related needs for tenant organizing and anti-eviction mutual aid. His work compares and contrasts grassroots eviction data with public eviction records to situate these data sets to useful endeavors and artifacts. Currently his work analyzes the complexity involved in creating and maintaining public records to surface critical considerations for how civic data is used to train and drive decision making in large algorithmic systems

Ben Miller is a professor at Emory University in Writing and Quantitative Theory and Methods, and is the Executive Editor of Atlanta Studies. For 20 years, his work has been about how new technologies are used by communities to tell stories of survival and how computational media changes the ways we collectively produce and read stories. Engaging with online collective behavior has led to projects with companies like Riot Games on understanding and moderating hate speech, and with support from groups like the NSF and Department of Defense, on understanding and countering violent extremism. In his role with Atlanta Studies, a decade-long partnership linking many Atlanta academic, civic, and cultural institutions, Ben helps promote public scholarship about the many histories and possible futures of Atlanta and the people who call it home. He also collaborates with urban studies researchers and activists on scholarship and policies that identify manifestations of inequality in housing. Prior to bringing this work to Emory’s Writing Program, Ben helped found the Creative Media Industries Institute at Georgia State, spent a few years in Boston, and taught as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech.

Brandeis Marshall is founder and CEO of DataedX Group, LLC. DataedX provides learning and development training to help educators, scholars and practitioners humanize their data practices. Dr. Marshall speaks, writes and strategizes on how to move slower and build better humanity-centered tech. She has been a Stanford PACS Practitioner Fellow and Partner Research Fellow at Siegel Family Endowment. Marshall has served as faculty at both Purdue University and Spelman College. Her research work in data education and data science has been supported by the National Science Foundation and philanthropy organizations. She is the author of Data Conscience: Algorithmic Siege on our Humanity (Wiley, 2022), co-editor of Mitigating Bias in Machine Learning (McGraw-Hill, 2024) and contributing author in The Black Agenda (Macmillan, 2022) and BCv2: The Future of Cool (Soft Skull, 2024).

Carl DiSalvo is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His work combines design, the social sciences, and the humanities to explore the social and political qualities of computing. He is committed to engaged scholarship and partners with communities, civil society, government, and industry throughout his work. He is the author of Adversarial Design (MIT Press 2012) and Design as Democratic Inquiry (MIT Press 2022). In addition, DiSalvo is a co-editor of the MIT Press journal Design Issues, and through the journal, he works to broaden contemporary discussions of design theory and criticism. 

Charmayne E. Patterson is the Interim Associate Provost for Faculty Success, Director of the Center for Innovative Teaching, Learning, and Engagement, and an Associate Professor of History at Clark Atlanta University. In those roles, she fosters professional growth, supervises Faculty Learning Communities, and champions educational innovation. Her scholarship encompasses a diverse range of topics, including social activism in historically black colleges and universities, the history of African Americans in mathematics and the natural sciences, and the impact of African American megachurches on social activism. Her forthcoming book on the STEM fields at HBCUs promises to be a significant contribution to the field.

Dan Sinykin is an assistant professor of English with a courtesy appointment in Quantitative Theory and Methods. He is the author of American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed Book Publishing and American Literature (Columbia University Press, 2023). He is a reviews editor at Critical AI and a culture industries section editor at Public Books. He is co-founder and co-editor of the Post45 Data Collective, which peer reviews and houses post-1945 literary and cultural data on an open-access website.

Debbie Olorunisola is an undergraduate at Yale University pursuing a B.S. in Statistics and Data Science. Her interests are largely within the fields of African and African-American Studies. She is interested in applying data science to research and analysis of population trends in public health and popular culture. More broadly, she hopes to expand public understanding of under-researched and hard-to-survey populations. Previously, she worked as a Project Co-Head for the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project and has volunteered for the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition.

Dez Miller is a writer, Atlantan, and PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University. Their scholarly work operates at the intersection of digital humanities, urban studies, and environmental literary studies. By contextualizing literary close readings with rhetorical histories gleaned from algorithmic language modeling, they explore how urban water infrastructures shape and are in turn shaped by cultural narratives. Dez also works as a Digital Scholarship Associate at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, where they assist Emory faculty and students with a variety of digital projects. Outside of their scholarly work, they have published short stories, local journalism, and generative poetry written in collaboration with coding languages.

Em Nordling is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Emory University. Their scholarship uses British literature of the long nineteenth century to interrogate the image of the protest crowd as it relates to both the function of collective agency and to the period’s burgeoning biopolitical forces. Using quantitative textual analysis, they examine the impact of quantification itself on the period’s crowd and population control discourse, and how it relates to racist scientific ideologies. In addition to their work with AIAI, they currently work as Research Data Associate at Sounding Spirit Research Lab and reviewer/essayist at Tor.com.

As a data analyst at DataedX, Joy has a keen eye for discovering insights and solving problems with data. She leads the data analysis and visualization efforts of AIAI Network’s Public Interest AI project, organizes the bi-monthly Rebel Tech Newsletter and supports the Black Women in Data community. Her interests in algorithmic bias, data privacy, and security where she advocates for ethical standards to protect product users. Joy recently interned at Click-On Kaduna Data Science Fellowship, where she helped the government utilize resources for better patient health. She was also a Google Women Tech Maker (WTM) ambassador and collaborated with several organizations to promote gender equality in tech. Joy speaks, writes, and encourages women to defy gender bias in tech and balance their careers with school. Joy graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Kaduna State University, Nigeria.

Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of Quantitative Theory & Methods and English at Emory University. She also directs the Digital Humanities Lab there. Before moving to Emory, she taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Lauren works at the intersection of data, AI, and the humanities, with an emphasis on questions of gender and race. She is the author and editor of several books, including Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), co-authored with Catherine D’Ignazio, which was named a “Must-Read Book for Spring 2020” by WIRED Magazine. Her newest project, Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, will be published by the MIT Press in 2024. 

Margy Adams is a Black feminist literary scholar and PhD candidate in the department of English at Emory University. She combines Black performance theory, sound studies, and humor studies to investigate literary and cultural constructions of race, queerness, gender, and language in Black American and Afro-Caribbean literature, giving specific attention to how knowledge is produced through the sound of and around laughter. As a digital and public humanist, Margy’s scholarship also considers the ways digital technologies cohere with Black compositional practices and what their practical interfaces reveal. Margy is the inaugural IDEAS (Interdisciplinary Exploration and Scholarship) Teaching Fellow for Emory’s Institute for the Liberal Arts, and she works as a digital scholarship assistant at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship with specializations in aural and visual design.

Ololade Faniyi is an African feminist activist-scholar and Ph.D. student in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies department at Emory University. Her graduate research adopts data-informed methods in investigating usage, affect, affordances, and ethics related to Nigerian (and more broadly African) contemporary gender and sexuality justice within digital networks. With central interests in digital humanities, African feminist digital cultures, data feminism and digital political communication, her sole and collaborative works have been published in Communication, Culture, and Critique, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Feminist Encounters, Women’s Studies in Communication, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. She was an inaugural Data Fellow for “Freedom on the Move”, the digital humanities and marronage project at Cornell University. She is also an African advisor of FRIDA, The Young Feminist Fund.

Ra’Niqua Lee writes to share her particular visions of love and the South. She earned an MFA in fiction from Georgia State University, and she is currently at Emory pursuing a PhD in African American literature with a focus on spatial and Black queer feminist theories. She is managing editor of Atlanta Studies and Southern Spaces. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Indiana Review, Passages North, Best of the Net 2023, Best Small Fictions 2023, and elsewhere. In 2021, the Georgia Writers Association awarded her the John Lewis Writing Grant for fiction.

Roy Chang is an undergraduate at Emory University pursuing a B.S. in Quantitative Sciences in Economics and a B.A. in Human Health. His interests revolve around using data analytics and emerging digital trends to investigate solutions that promote health equity and social justice in healthcare. In the past, Roy has held a research position at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, as well as internships at AstraZeneca, Elevance Health (formerly Anthem Inc.), and West Monroe Partners. 

Sandeep Soni is an Assistant Professor in the Quantitative Theory and Methods department at Emory University. His research primarily focuses on developing and applying language technology to answer questions about society and culture. The problems that interest him are concerned with modeling the social dynamics of language change, about quantifying linguistic influence, and measuring physical mobility in fiction. His work has been published at premier conferences in natural language processing such as ACL and EMNLP and journals such as the Journal of Cultural Analytics.

Shiyao Li is a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science & Informatics at Emory University, primarily concentrates his research endeavors on the detection and quantification of cognitive bias within visual analytics. Shiyao is contributing to the AI and Invisible Labor project, designing and developing visualizations to highlight the invisible labor involved in the development of AI and other technical projects.

Tanvi is a design technologist and researcher committed to creating progressive and interdisciplinary experiences. She holds an MS in human Computer Interaction from New York University, and a BFA in Graphic Design and Political Theory from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. She is a contributor on Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, to be published by the MIT Press in 2024. Tanvi strives to explore alternative ways of understanding the convergence of the social experience, aesthetics & language. When she’s not designing, she’s reading and gardening with her peers to build solidarity and thoughtfulness.