I have several side projects, with more on the way.
August 19, 2024
Running Python in the browser
Executing Python code in a browser environment is emerging as a core part of the toolkit powering recent developments in the web space for Python, including Jupyter alternatives like Marimo. I’m really excited about this tooling, and wanted to dive in and see what kinds of things I could spin up in a weekend.
August 8, 2024
Montréal recommendations
Montréal is full of incredible hidden gems. Everyone who lives in a place has to at some point make a guide to that place — so — here’s mine for Montréal. If you like this list or found it useful, please let me know what your favorite stops were… email me!
December 27, 2023
Jams from 2023
I wasn’t able to listen to quite as much music this year as I would have liked – it was more of a podcast year (Criminal, anyone?). But as always, there’s so much new music to look back on — and so much to look forward to next year.
April 24, 2023
Depths of Wikipedia & transit syntax
Updated May 17, 2023: I had a ton of fun this weekend joining Annie Rauwerda (aka @depthsofwikipedia) as a guest for the Montréal stop of her live tour. I spoke a bit about my work on local Wikipedia – like the article on Snow removal in Montreal and the Montreal Metro route diagram (and my brush with craziness by means of art and NFTs last year).
March 29, 2023
An archive of music lists
I published a few months ago my music list for 2022, and so they’re preserved better, I also wanted to capture my lists from 2020 and 2021. Take a read, go listen to some of these tunes, and hopefully you feel inspired to buy some on Bandcamp or see some live. (Or, even better, you’ve also listened to plenty of these artists and are just as excited about them as I am.)
February 17, 2023
Second Helpings in a Streaming Age
I originally published this article in February, 2018 as an undergrad at McGill. I think about this idea fairly frequently, and it’s something that’s increasingly relevant as more, and more, and more media becomes available (and disposable).
December 22, 2022
Tunes to close out the year
It’s usually fun to end the year & look back on some of my favourite new releases of the year…I love using NeverEndingChartRendering. No funky branding and I can pull music from wherever. I ignore albums that I listened to a lot but weren’t my favourites, and add in albums that can’t be found on streaming (stuff I stumbled into on YouTube, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, or random hosting sites, usually).
January 19, 2022
Getting doxxed and hanging out on Wikipedia
In early December 2021, I visited the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. It’s a public museum that hosts the private collection of Eli and Edyth Broad, a billionare philanthropist couple who generated their wealth in the insurance business. They have on display there Rabbit, a notable Jeff Koons sculpture.
February 26, 2021
Editing Wikipedia, with Poetry Matters
This January, I facilitated a seminar for McGill’s Poetry Matters initiative, focusing on the demystification of Wikipedia editing with a focus on articles about modern poets. A big thank you to Prof. Miranda Hickman, who organizes Poetry Matters, for inviting me to present.
September 30, 2020
Everyday Specialization on Wikipedia
A paper I wrote studying specialization on Wikipedia was just published through the McGill .txtLab and is available there: txtlab.org/2020/09/do-wikipedia-editors-specialize/. The paper focuses on how editors on Wikipedia cluster around different topics—if that interests you, check it out!
May 5, 2020
Predicting the Author
Under the supervision of Prof. Steven Greenwood, Caitlin Kindig & I designed an ML study to clarify salient questions about the role of the screenwriter in the distinctiveness of a screenplay. To perform this study, we used complete screenplays from sixteen films, broken into 80-word snippets. An SVM was trained on those snippets (which had character names and stop words removed) and predicted the screenplay, genre, director, and production company of new, unseen snippets. Genres were curated from Rotten Tomatoes, and the top two genres for each film were chosen and the classifier was trained on and predicted both. An overview of the results, and some highlights from the analysis, are shown below.
April 25, 2020
The Riddle Project
After a year as a member of The Riddle Project, a research project within the McGill Library, I just handed off my role as the developer to an oncoming research assistant. The role has introduced me to many new ideas and concepts, and has been instrumental as I’ve learned more about design and web development with a research focus. I’m excited to see where the project goes, as there is still an abundance of work to be done to continue to refine and present the material related to the project.
January 30, 2020
Wikipedia Histories
I’ve just released a project onto PyPi, wikipedia-histories. I built it in Fall 2018 and I’m just releasing it now after restructuring it into a generalizable tool. After digging around for what felt like ages trying to find a way to scrape the content of previous revisions of Wikipedia articles, I ended up building my own program to complete the task, using several other Wikipedia parsers to help reach that end.
January 21, 2020
Instagram Bots
Update, November 2020:The Wikipedia Picture of the Day bot is now active again on Twitter, which has a much more permissive API—one which I would highly recommend working with. There is also a companion bot, POTD context.
November 23, 2019
secretgroup.xyz
I organize and curate an art and design collective in Montreal called secretgroup, based around a series of spontaneous events and art spaces. More information on the collective, and the events we host, is available on our website at secretgroup.xyz.
April 3, 2019
Horror Social Networks
To help identify and analyze the themes, tropes, and structure of horror, I created a set of graphs representing the social networks of various films and used network analysis to help clarify the role of the female gothic in social structure and identify the relationship between theatricality and role-playing in the horror genre.
March 26, 2019
Reconciliation in Chaos
In Fall 2018, I wrote a paper based around sentiment analysis I conducted on a play, Judith Thompson's Palace of the End. The paper was published by The Channel, the McGill Department of English Undergraduate Review in March 2019.