Making place for conversation.
I build research programs and technical toolkits to study and improve intercultural understanding through in-person, place-based conversation.
Knowledge · Understanding · Response
My work explores the intersection of place-based learning, conversation analysis, and machine learning, shaped by 18 years of experience working in education, design, and technology.
Research Programs
Local Conversation Studio
Place-based research on language, identity, and everyday interaction
Local Conversation Studio investigates how locals and visitors adapt to a place and negotiate language, identity, and knowledge through everyday interactions and conversation.
The work combines ethnographic field research and qualitative analysis with the design of small, analog interventions that facilitate in-person intercultural dialogue.
Learning from Oaxaca
Field research on language and local identity in a city renowned for celebrating diversity.
AI-QA
AI-assisted qualitative analysis for exploring interview data.
Local Knowledge Cache
Place-based knowledge-base to ground design interventions in local context.
Local Language Cards
Hand-held analog tools to support intercultural adaptation.
Tools for Conversation
Infrastructure for capturing, encoding, and analyzing embodied interaction
Tools for Conversation is a methods and infrastructure research program focused on how conversational data is captured, processed, and reviewed.
Rather than treating conversation as text to be inferred, the program treats it as spatial, embodied, and multi-party, developing hardware and software tools that preserve these conversational features for more accurate and contextually aware analysis.
Convo-Box
Recording hardware optimized to study in-person conversation.
Convo-Recorder
Multi-camera recording software for improved transcription
Convo-Max
Multimodal automated transcription for conversation analysis.
Convo-Script
Lightweight multimodal annotation software for rapid human correction.