I work as a Lecturer, Data Scientist, and Senior Consultant at UC Berkeley's D-Lab. I lead the curriculum design for D-Lab’s data science workshop portfolio, as well as the Digital Humanities Summer Program at Berkeley.
Former research projects include a Research Associate position in the ‘Discovering and Attesting Digital Discrimination’ project at King’s College London (2019-2022) and a researcher-in-residence role for the UK’s National Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction, and Adversarial Influence Online (2022). My research uses Natural Language Processing methods to investigate norms and biases in language models. I am also interested in public perceptions of unfair treatment by AI systems.
I earned my Ph.D. from Tilburg University in the Netherlands (2016), focusing on the promotional language of tourism. My first book, 'Scripted Journeys: Authenticity in Hypermediated Tourism' (De Gruyter 2021), is about the increasing predictability of touristic experience due to the explosion of personalized information in the form of travel platforms like TripAdvisor, Google Maps, and Airbnb. This results in an intensified, and paradoxical, search for authenticity when traveling. The promise of travel platforms is that authenticity can be achieved through autonomy and waywardness--yet it is also made fully dependent on digital infrastructures.
Explainer video: Scripted Journeys - A book on tourism, algorithms, and authenticity (YouTube video)
My second book, 'Traveling Through Video Games' (Routledge 2023), discusses how video games and their players increasingly borrow from the language of tourism to sell and experience these games. Ludic travel often involves a mythological promise of open-ended opportunity, summarized in the slogan "you can go there". This logic of tourism is fundamentally consumptive—but through design choices, players can also be invited to approach their travels more critically.
Fairness, Perceptions of AI, Hermeneutics
