Things I built that stuck around.
Three decades, one through-line: I tend to find the medium before there’s a shared language for it. Then I build the thing, teach with it, see what happens, and do it again.
All projects, newest first
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2025
Defining AI Literacy Within Existing Frameworks
AI literacy is often treated as a brand-new thing that needs its own framework, its own pedagogy, and probably its own acronym. This project takes a different approach: what if we put AI literacy inside the information-literacy frameworks that libraries, writing programs, and academic units already use? The study brings together perspectives from multiple institutions. The interviews are the beginning of a larger conversation about what AI literacy actually needs to be. Read more.
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2025
AI Implementation and Governance at Emerging Research Institutions
AI gets a lot of attention for what it might do. This project is interested in something less glamorous: what happens when you actually try to put the tools to work. We looked at AI in research administration, including the grant lifecycle, compliance, reporting, and all the other logistics that determine whether faculty can actually get their research done. The question wasn’t simply Can AI do this? It was Where does it belong in the workflows research offices already have? Findings published by Ithaka S+R: AI Adoption in Research Administration at Emerging Research Institutions.
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2025–2026
Canvas Syllabus & Grades Import
A long-asked-for integration: pull syllabus and grade data into Canvas from the systems that already own it, so faculty can stop typing the same information into multiple places. The interesting part wasn’t the technology. It was the conversation around who owns the data, how often it should refresh, and what happens when two systems disagree. Sometimes the hardest part of an integration is figuring out who gets to decide what the data means.
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2021–2023
200-classroom hybrid upgrade
200 rooms. One summer. $2 million. We designed, scoped, and installed a full hybrid-classroom refresh across campus, completing the project on time and within budget. The teams who would support those rooms after installation were involved from the beginning. That part matters. A room isn’t really finished when the contractor leaves.
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2021
Diversity Infusion Course Redesign Institute
A faculty institute built around a simple idea: accessibility and inclusion work better when they are part of the course from the beginning rather than something we try to bolt on later. Together, we redesigned syllabi, learning activities, and assessments. We also built a cohort of faculty who could take what they learned back to their departments and keep the conversation going.
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2020
The five-day pivot to remote
1,200 faculty. 3,000+ courses. Five days. Zero disruption to the academic calendar.
We had less than a week between the announcement and the first remote class. Every IT team had a role. Faculty champions carried the work into their departments. People learned things they had never expected to have to learn, very quickly. It was an extraordinary amount of work under extraordinary circumstances. It also taught me a great deal about what institutions can do when everyone understands the problem they’re trying to solve.
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2014–2024
Chapman ePortfolios
This started as a place for faculty to share digital scholarship. It eventually became something much bigger: Chapman’s institutional Tenure & Promotion review system, used by every tenure-track faculty member to make their case. It ran for a decade before we retired it in 2024. There is something satisfying about building a thing that outlives the reason you originally built it.
Invited chapter in People, Practice, Power (Debates in the Digital Humanities, University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
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2010
DHSoCal
A regional Digital Humanities collaboratory built to give scholars across Southern California a place to find one another, share work, and find collaborators. The formal group is no longer active. Many of us are still in touch. Not everything needs to become an institution that lasts forever. Sometimes creating a place for people to meet is enough.
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2008–2011
Making History Podcast
Long-form interviews with historians about how the work actually gets done. I started it in 2008, when “academic podcast” wasn’t really a category yet. We talked about research, archives, teaching, books, and the parts of academic life that don’t usually make it into the finished publication. The website is long gone, but the archive survives through the Internet Archive.
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2000s–
pilgrimgirl
Twenty-plus years of writing under the name pilgrimgirl: journey narratives, disability, faith, feminism, institutions, and the long arc of becoming. The name came from my work as a historian studying journey narratives. The writing became something much bigger than the original project. Read the archive.
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1995
First hand-coded websites
Before the commercial web had settled into anything recognizable. Before there were platforms. When “making a website” meant opening a text editor and writing the HTML tags by hand. I did that in 1995. Apparently, I never really stopped.
Still curious? If you’re here because one of these projects connects to something you’re working on, I’d love to hear about it.