Work Samples

Design and development of a Wordpress plugin that enables better discussion with paragraph-level commenting.

Designed and developed at the Institue for the Future of the Book, CommentPress is an open-source Wordpress theme that allows for paragraph level commenting. CommentPress changes the interaction readers have with a text by altering the traditional blog layout, elevating the discussion from the bottom of the page to an area beside the text. It also automatically generates comment indexes so people can enter the text through the comments.

Samples 1-4 show the progression of CommentPress from the original conception to the current release.

• Sample 1 - Holy of Holies
• Sample 2 - Iraq Study Group Report
• Sample 3 - HASTAC Learning Initiatives
• Sample 4 - Ithaka Learning Initiatives
• Sample 5 - All Comments feature documentation [pdf]

Design and development for McKenzie Wark's book, GAMER THEORY, in a novel online reading environment.

The Institute for the Future of the Book developed McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H30RY for digital publication. I designed a website that displayed the entire text of Wark’s book and invited the public to begin discussions in the margins. These discussions influenced the printed book, published in spring 2007 by Harvard University Press. The Institute subsequently published a second online edition of the evolved text.

• Sample 1 - GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1
• Sample 2 - GAM3R 7H30RY Portal
• Sample 3 - A long discussion of what it is and how we got there

Interaction design and documentation for a desktop-based multimedia authoring tool

Another Institute project, Sophie is a tool for building multimedia texts. I worked with a distributed team to design and develop the first public release of Sophie. To help early adopters, I led three hands-on workshops: one at our office, one at the Educause Learning Initiatives conference in Atlanta (January 2007), and one at Ohio State University (February 2007). Sophie is currently being developed for use with the OLPC.

• Sample 1 - Structure palette interaction descriptions [pdf]
• Sample 2 - Structure palette diagrams [pdf]
• Sample 3 - Chapter diagrams [pdf]

Project management and interaction design and development for a prototype digital archive.

I led a team of students at UNC–Chapel Hill to develop a digital archive prototype for the William Ferris Southern Folklore Collection. We developed a proof-of- concept web site with a faceted browsing taxonomy that satisfied the needs of casual users, researchers, and archivists. We used personas, library cataloging standards, and interviews with archivists to guide our process.

• Sample 1 - Southern Folklife Digital Archive
• Sample 2 - An example of a faceted browsing page
• Sample 3 - An example of a detail page

Project management for an information architecture redesign of ibiblio.org.

ibiblio.org is a major online repository of free information and open-source software. I led a team to rearchitect the site based on user surveys, log analysis, and interviews with ibiblio staff. We delivered a plan to improve navigation and raise awareness of ibiblio’s breadth of content and its research.

• Sample 1 - Wireframe of the homepage
• Sample 2 - The Collections page
• Sample 3 - A collection topic
• Sample 4 - A collection sub-topic
• Sample 5 - The new Contributor login page