Active Research

My primary research examines ways by which computer software tools can be made to better support the creative processes of their users. (This is not to be confused with making computers artificially creative in their own right.) In support of this research, I have developed, or am developing, several projects. Note: Many of these projects will be released as open-source projects once they have matured. Stay tuned for announcements.

A suite of experimental music composition tools that permit experienced composers to discover new musical directions, and lets amateurs create astoundingly rich and complex music without having to know anything about music theory. Unlike other composition systems, Wheelsong's output is not constrained to one narrow style or sound - to date, it has been used to produce credible pieces in jazz, blues, Baroque counterpoint, pop and a variety of “film score” styles, not to mention non-western genres such as Javanese gamelan. (This project does not yet have a public site.)

An experimental creative environment for writers that allows them to treat their work as a slowly evolving stew of ideas, themes, facts and details in addition to the content itself, in a way that facilitates both exploration and experimentation. And yes, it does spell checking, too. (This project does not yet have a public site.)

A tool for exploratory analysis of texts, including medieval manuscripts. This project is being developed in collaboration with Dr. Yin Liu, for her examination of the medieval text, “Sir Perceval of Galles.”

As Co-Managing Editor of the online journal Digital Studies and a founding member of ETRUS, I am particularly interested in exploring opportunities to connect computer academics with those using computers to explore topics in the humanities. By raising the level of technical discourse in such research from the IT level to the scholarly plane, many exciting new possibilities come into view.

Through my involvement in Communities for Children and kidSKAN, I am working with teams of other researchers and community advocates to help improve the lives of children in Saskatoon and Saskatchewan, based on sound evidence and well-researched practices.

This was a web-based precursor to Glyphicus, developed in association with Dr. Peter Stoicheff and Joel DeShaye, for their examination of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.

A really simple app that does an amazing number of things. In a nutshell, it's an idea manager that allows you to organize little fragmentary notes to yourself in an ocean of such notes via ad-hoc contextual tags (which the humanities people refer to as a 'folksonomy'). Once entered into Jink, ideas can be searched, sorted, explored, etc., in a way that lets them bump into each other in unexpected ways, creating opportunities for new inspiration to arise while you're working.

This was a commercial engine and prototype editing system that represented textural image data in a highly compact format for distribution in web systems. The editor was based on the principles of interactive genetic evolution of structured image data and represented a significant, more “intuitionist” departure from the constructivist model employed by other “painting” programs.