Hello, World! My name is Spencer. I’m a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Information and Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I have a S.M. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. in Modeling and Simulation Engineering from Old Dominion University. I am originally from Virginia Beach, Virginia but I presently live in Amherst, Massachusetts with my wife and daughter.

I am currently working on a project on filtering and sorting social media posts from different networks. This is in collaboration with Prof. Ethan Zuckerman and the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure. We will be designing a platform that will present posts from different social networks in one unified interface that gives the user fine-grained control over what posts they see and how they are organized. We hope that this system will allow users to utilize smaller independent social networks without having to leave the existing platforms.

This blog will serve as writing practice and a place to keep track of the various sources I read while working on this project. The goal is to summarize the important points of the different things I read as I read them and over time develop a good bibliography that I can reference for later. It also serves as practice in writing for a general audience rather than a technical or academic one. Most of the posts will be summaries of individual papers or book chapters, though I hope to add some meta-posts that summarize groups of articles in relation to each other. Articles and books will be from a wide range of sources and a wide range of academic fields both technical and otherwise.

Initially the focus will be on the background literature for discussions about social media and on articles about platforms and programs that had goals similar to those that we are pursuing.