Allison gives an acceptance speech for her Davidson Fellows Scholarship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., September 2017
Allison gives an acceptance speech for her Davidson Fellows Scholarship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., September 2017
This program dismantles barriers of gender and ability in the weight room (Spring 2019-current). Design Thinking. Entrepreneurship.
An exhibit challenging participants to examine whether their physical environment is conducive to their work. A novel, interactive format based off of psychology and neuroscience research on creativity (Fall 2019). Project planning. Community outreach. Workshop design.
Designing a two-tiered Hidden Markov Model to mimic the work of a great Poet Laureate. Programming a metaphor generator with WordNet (a lexical database). Crafting the theory around human-computer collaboration in poetry. Computing. Research. Writing.
My degree at Princeton is towards a Bachelor's of Arts in History. See my research on the Early Church and the Epistle to the Hebrews or the frontier between U.S. and Mexico. Research. Writing.
Pictured above: The Christian martyr Polycarp has been set on fire, but is inflammable.
Adalaide Morris introduces New Media Poetics: Context, Technotexts & Theories by suggesting that language always strains to catch up with the lived experience. The trick is not to be ahead of one’s time, but in one’s time. This “lag” between thought and lived experience leads me to believe that we can mine language — a sort of crystallization of thought — to discover links between the past and present.
Last week, I proposed that we create a “lexical” archive that looks up historical sources by searching for specific words that might have persisted from the past to the present, and so might help us make connections between past and present. As I thought more about what I was really proposing, I found myself becoming more skeptical about the idea. By basing the archive on ‘word search,’ I was essentially proposing that the archive revolve around a ‘googling’ function. With some research, I realized that googling reflects a new attitude that humans have towards information, an attitude that is antithetical to the very practice of history.