Welcome to the first and longest running website maintained by a professor at Georgetown University. I am the Founding Director of Georgetown's Communication, Culture & Technology Program (CCT), and have been a professor at Georgetown for over 25 years. I set up the first website at Georgetown in 1993, and began developing websites for courses in 1994. When I launched the CCT Program in 1995-96, I began developing individual sites for each graduate course with web syllabi, readings, and lecture notes, and this site has become my archive of courses, lectures, essays, and presentations for students and those interested in the fields I work in.

My teaching philosophy entails using the Web to implement real-time teaching: moving students out of the black box of the classroom and into a world of personal inquiry and practice.

My teaching and research interests span several fields and disciplines: theory and philosophy of technology and culture; semiotics, linguistics, and philosophy of language; computation and symbolic cognition; media and communication theory and history; art theory and history; and intersections in art, music, film, and visual culture. This site provides links to my course syllabi, lectures and presentations, and published work for use by all students and anyone interested in my various projects.

I now maintain Wordpress sites for student seminar work (after years of managing a Seminar Wiki site). This platform enables student discussions and contributions to the real-time knowledge-building purpose of seminars in a peer-dialog context, and allows students to publish rich-content essays and final research projects. Student work is accessible on the Web, indexed by Google and other Web indexing sites. The platform provides a fixed URL for reference and use by students in future professional work.

Recent seminar sites for student work:

• CCTP-820: Leading by Design – Principles of Technical and Social Systems (Fall 2015)
• CCTP-748: Media Theory and Meaning Systems (Spring 2015)
• CCTP-711: Semiotics and Cognitive Technologies (Fall 2014)
• CCTP-748: Media Theory and Cognitive Technologies (Spring 2014)
• CCTP-725: Cultural Hybridity: Remix and Dialogic Culture (Spring 2014)
• CCTP-748: Media Theory and Digital Culture (Spring 2013)
• CCTP-725: Cultural Hybridity: Remix and Dialogic Culture (Fall 2013)
• CCTP-797: Technology / Theory / Culture (Fall 2013)

The earlier Seminar Wiki (2006-2012), alas, is no longer archived.

Work in Progress

• The Semiotic Foundations of Computing: A Peircean Redescription of Computation, Information, and Digital Media (book in progress).
• "Semiotics, Computation, and Artificial Intelligence." Chapter in The Bloomsbury Companion to Semiotics (Bloomsbury Press, 2020). Abstract.

Recent Papers, Articles, and Book Chapters

• "Peirce's 'Logic as Semeiotic' and Semiotic Design Homologies in Computing Systems," Semiotic Society of America Annual Meeting, 2019.
• "A Peircean Redescription of Computation: All Computing is Humanistic Computing." Semiotic Society of America Annual Meeting, 2018.
• "C. S. Peirce and the Foundations of Computation: Automatable Semiosis." Semiotic Society of America Annual Meeting, 2016.
• "The Continuum in the Code Base: Computation as Automated Semiosis," invited paper for Le sujet digital: / The Digital Subject: Codes, University of Paris VIII, November, 2015.
• "Remix and the Dialogic Engine of Culture: A Model for Generative Combinatoriality" (prepublication version, pdf).
  In The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, ed. Eduardo Navas, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 15-42.
• "The Work on the Street: Street Art and Visual Culture" (pre-press pdf). Chapter in The Handbook of Visual Culture, ed. Barry Sandywell and Ian Heywood. London and New York: Berg, 2012, 235-278. See also thumbnail list of images cited (pdf).
• "Extensible Memory, Distributed Cognition, and Artefactual Intelligence: Exorcising the Ghost in the Machine," invited paper for Le sujet digital: l'hypermnésie / The Digital Subject: Questioning Hypermnesia, University of Paris VIII, November 15, 2012.
• Bibliography of publications in Curriculum Vitae [being updated]