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 30 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 custom-designed sites for each course with web syllabi, readings, and lecture notes, and this site has now become my archive of courses, lectures, essays, and presentations for students and those interested in the fields I work in.

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.

Work in Progress

• The Semiotic Foundations of Computing: A Peircean Redescription of Computation, Information, and Digital Media (book in progress).
• "Semiotics, Computation, and Information." Chapter in The Bloomsbury Companion to Semiotics, ed Jamin Pelkey (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). [pdf of the final pre-publication draft]. A more complete study of the relevant C. S. Peirce papers will be included in The Semiotic Foundations of Computing book.

Research Resource Site: C. S. Peirce's Logic as Semeiotic Project (c.1896-1913)

• This site makes available my research on the Peirce Papers collection archived at Houghton Library, Harvard University, for my book project. I have been focusing on the unpublished papers (drafts, letters, notebooks) from the 1890s-1912. There is a link to my spreadsheet (of nearly 1,000 sources. This contains brief notes and dates of the papers for a clear picture of the trajectory of Peirce's work on logic, semiotics, mathematics, computation, and designs for technical instruments, including the many papers and notes on his methods for binary (base 2) computation, which he developed in great detail several decades before the beginnings of our digital computing era.

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]