Research notebook

Musings.

Fragments, questions, and echoes of meaning traced through machine, memory, language, culture, and place.

This is a thinking surface rather than a collection of finished claims: a changing board of observations, provocations, remembered lines, and questions that sometimes become research.

“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”Melvin Kranzberg, 1986

I find peace where the sun forgets to sleep and the night is eternal.

Alaska—and you too, New Zealand.

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything.”

Ada Lovelace, Notes on the Analytical Engine, 1843

We are still figuring out what we have ordered the engine to do.

Bridging humanities theory and computational logic remains hard.

But I do it anyway.

What computational markers signal good storytelling?

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Joan Didion, “The White Album,” 1979

Could one unintended result of cultural flattening be that communities with less access to large-scale AI retain more of what technologically dominant cultures smooth away?

Digital colonialism?

Is domestication still the dominant translation mode?

Does a trained preference for universality reproduce cultural dominance by muting intensity, conflict, ambiguity, and difference?

Machine translation as metaphor

Translation is not word substitution. It is structural morphing: shifting architectures of meaning and contextual gravity.

I do not only want to analyze it. I want to listen to the ways meaning bends in transit.

AI can strip away feeling and cultural context in the name of universality.

Do human translators leave themselves in the work, as painters leave a trace in a portrait? Which is better—and for whom?

Best meals in odd places

The best Greek food I ever had was in London. The best Serbian food? Alaska. The best French fries came from a little Italian window that looked older than civilization itself.

The work that changed my work

A 2024 manuscript became the nexus of my research into translation, narrative intensity, memory, and what survives transformation.

Read the origins

Five minutes → one hour → one day.

All within “industry standards.”

On glass ceilings, solutions, and ancestry

I was the only woman in the room. I solved what they could not, and I carried color on the shoulders of my ancestors while the rooms stayed full of muted pastels.

The ceiling was never made of glass. It was iron, forged from old expectations, bending only for the familiar.

Personal / poetic Place / sensory experience Technology / AI Literary / cultural analysis Process notes

Quotation sources

Kranzberg: “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,’” Technology and Culture, 1986.

Lovelace: Notes appended to “Sketch of the Analytical Engine,” 1843.

Didion: “The White Album,” first published in book form in 1979.