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The WST Team

The Writing Studies Tree was seeded in 2011-2012 by a team of doctoral students and faculty at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), and is actively maintained by the folks below.

Primary Developers

Benjamin Miller is an Assistant Professor of English Composition at the University of Pittsburgh. Formerly an Instructional Technology Fellow at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY, Ben earned his Ph.D. from The Graduate Center, CUNY, with a certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. His dissertation used distant reading techniques to examine the dynamics of research- and discourse-communities within recent doctoral-level scholarship in composition and rhetoric / writing studies. A founding editor of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and a founding member of the WPA Metropolitan Affiliate in New York, Ben received the 2012 Chairs' Memorial Scholarship from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), in part for his work on the initial prototype of the Writing Studies Tree. Ben is also co-chair of the Creative Writing SIG at CCCC; his first collection of poems, Without Compass, was published by Four Way Books in 2014. He has taught writing courses at the University of Pittsburgh, Hunter College, and Columbia University. Work on the Writing Studies Tree began when he, Amanda, and Jill were all active members of the Graduate Center Composition and Rhetoric Community (GCCRC) at CUNY.

Amanda Licastro is the Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric in the English Department at Stevenson University in Maryland. Amanda is completing her doctoral dissertation, “Excavating Eportfolios: Digging into a Decade of Student-Driven Data," in the English Program at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and completed her certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy which included an independent study on the folksonomy of the WST. Previously Amanda has worked as an adjunct professor in both northeastern Pennsylvania and New York City, and as a Macaulay Honors College Instructional Technology Fellow. Amanda also serves on the editorial collective of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and is the co-organizer of the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative and member (previous co-chair) of the Graduate Center Composition and Rhetoric Community. Amanda has participated in digital humanities and writing studies scholarship at the national level through invited speaking engagements and presentations at conferences such as the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Modern Language Association conference, Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, Computers and Writing, the Writing Program Administrator’s conference, as well as other local conferences on teaching and technology. Amanda also received scholarships to attend the Digital Humanities Summer and Winter Institutes through funding from the ACH, GCDI, and the NINES project.

Jill Belli, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English at New York City College of Technology, CUNY, where she teaches writing and literature courses, as well as courses in the college's recently launched B.S. in Professional and Technical Writing. She also serves as a Co-Director of the OpenLab, City Tech's open-source digital platform for teaching, learning, and collaborating. She earned her Ph.D. in English from The Graduate Center, CUNY along with doctoral certificates in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and American Studies. Jill is a former Instructional Technology Fellow at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY, a founding member of the CUNY-Wide Composition and Rhetoric Community (CCRC), and the current web developer for the North American Society for Utopian Studies. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on writing studies/composition & rhetoric, digital humanities, positive psychology/happiness studies, utopian studies, and education/pedagogy. Visit Jill's website to learn more about her and her work: http://jillbelli.org/

Visualization Programmers

As of this writing, Matthew Miller is a dual master’s candidate in Information Science and History of Art at the Pratt Institute. He has presented projects at the International Dublin Core Conference (DCMI), Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) and ASIS&T Annual Meeting. Matt has worked on a number of projects including IMLS funded Project CHART and is currently the lead developer for the Linked Jazz project. Previously Matt has worked as a web developer for the Ohio State University and has ten years’ experience designing, building and implementing web applications. Matt also assisted in creating the visualizations for the WST.

Jeffrey Binder is a PhD student in English at CUNY who specializes in nineteenth century American literature, digital humanities, and critical theory. Jeff comes to the humanities from a background in computer programming, and much of his work involves putting new digital technologies into dialogue with their historical precedents. With Collin Jennings, a PhD candidate in English at NYU, Jeff developed the Networked Corpus, which provides a new way of navigating texts using the statistical method known as topic modeling. Jeff and Collin presented on this project at MLA 2014, and are currently preparing a paper on the topic for publication. At CUNY's New Media Lab, Jeff is currently working on a Web site about the ways early American lexicographers and writers dealt with the divergence of British and American dialects of English. The site will include both an archive of annotated primary sources and interactive visualizations based on data about word usage over time on both sides of the Atlantic.

Project Advisors

Sondra Perl, Ph.D., is Professor of English at Lehman College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she coordinates the composition and rhetoric area group within the English Ph.D. program and is a founding member of the CUNY-Wide Composition and Rhetoric Community. An acclaimed teacher and a Guggenheim Fellow, Dr. Perl lectures widely on topics related to the teaching of writing and most recently on the importance of bringing digital technology into the composition classroom. A pioneer in early research on composing processes, Perl is now studying how composing changes when new media are introduced. Her most recent work involves digital storytelling with freshmen in the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY, and her newly revised textbook, Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction (2014), features a new chapter on digital composing and new media. Other publications include On Austrian Soil: Teaching Those I Was Taught to Hate (SUNY, 2005), Felt Sense: Writing With the Body (Heinemann, 2008), and "Stepping on My Brother's Head" and Other Secrets Your English Professor Never Told You: A College Reader (Heinemann, 2010, with Charles Schuster). In 2005, Sondra Perl founded the Holocaust Educators Network, a project that brings the lessons of the Holocaust into today's world by working with teachers across the country. Perl currently directs this project and as a result has turned her own expertise as a writer toward the creation of DVDs and videos that tell the story of this evolving program.

Matthew K. Gold, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he serves as Advisor to the Provost for Master’s Programs and Digital Initiatives and Acting Executive Officer of the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies (MALS), and is a faculty member in both the MALS Program and the Doctoral Certificate Program in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. He serves as Director of the GC Digital Scholarship Lab, Director of the CUNY Academic Commons, Co-Director of the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, and Director of the “Looking for Whitman” project. He is editor of Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minnesota, 2012) and has published work in The Journal of Modern Literature, Kairos, and On the Horizon, as well as in the edited collections From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup (Minnesota, 2010), Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy (iDC, 2010), and the forthcoming collections Teaching Digital Humanities (Open Book Publishers, 2012) and The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media and Textuality (Johns Hopkins, 2012). His digital humanities projects, including “Looking for Whitman” and “The Commons In A Box,” have been supported by grants from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. He was recently elected to the Executive Council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities.

Past Team Members

Diana Epelbaum, Chris Leary, Erica Kaufman, Andrew Statum, Lisa Vaia, and Dominique Zino



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