Over the years I’ve worn several hats: journalist, researcher, designer, corporate manager, academic librarian, grill cook, and banjo player, to name a few.
My most recent book Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. My first book Informatica: Mastering Information Through the Ages was republished in 2023 as a second edition by Cornell University Press (originally published in 2007 as Glut by National Academies Press) My writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon.com, Interactions, Communications of the ACM, and elsewhere.
At the moment I work by day as a User Experience lead for Google Search, and recently completed my PhD in Transition Design at Carnegie Mellon School of Design. In years past I have held UX leadership roles at Instagram, Etsy, The New York Times, and IBM; and have consulted for clients including frog design, Adobe, Yahoo!, The New York Public Library, and the Internet Archive, among others. In my pre-Web life I worked as an academic librarian at Harvard, and briefly thought I wanted to be a rare books librarian—until this newfangled Internet thing came along. If you’d like to learn more about my checkered career past, feel free to peruse my Linkedin profile.
I occasionally speak at industry conferences and events, such as the SxSW, O’Reilly, and Gartner Group conferences. If you’re interested in having me come speak to your group, feel free to contact me.
On the personal front, I live in Brooklyn with my wife, two sons, one dog, and three banjos.
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