After 25 years, I left academia in 2021 to join Apple where I was hired as a distinguished research scientist working in ML-driven personalization and recommendations. Today I serve as a Senior Research Manger, overseeing the AIML personalization science teams for Apple App Store, Books, Podcasts, and Video. My last academic post was at Washington State University, where I served for three years as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of Literature and Data Analytics. Parallel to my academic career, I engaged in a variety of entrepreneurial ventures and was involved in founding three book industry tech startups (Novel Projects DBA “booklamp.org“, Archer Jockers, LLC, and Authors A.I.) and the non-profit Western Institute of Irish Studies cultural organization.
As a professor, my research and teaching was focused on large scale computational text analysis, specifically described in my first book “Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History.” Though I took a decidedly computational turn, my original training was as a literary scholar with expertise in Irish and Irish-American literature of the late 19th- and early 20th-century.
My second book, Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature, was conceived as a “how-to” complement to Macroanalysis. In 2020, I teamed up with my then grad student Rosamond Thalken to write a second edition that added several new chapters and updated a lot of the code using more modern code libraries.
My third book, The Bestseller Code, which I co-authored with another former grad student, Jodie Archer, was published for the trade press. The underlying algorithm for predicting which books were most likley to hit the New York Times bestseller list won the University of Nebraska’s “Breakthrough Innovation of the Year Award” in 2017.