forthcoming
Cryptographic Amnesia
A cultural history of cryptography, from wartime instrument to civil-liberties cause to the ambient infrastructure of digital life.
[ 02 / writing ]
Writing & investigations
A book, data investigations, and peer-reviewed research — on cryptography, data practice, and the systems that move information.
Book
[ book ]Investigations
[ investigation ]2026
How Much Is a Verification Worth?
What a single identity verification is actually worth, costed from the data.
2026
America's Most-Sued Companies Don't Exist
Surfaced 8,747 federal mass-defendant cases from the RECAP archive to show how mass-litigation targets businesses that don't really exist.
2026
Anatomy of a Shell Company
What a shell company actually looks like — and how shared addresses, agents, and officers expose the networks behind them.
2026
Wyoming's Corporate Boom
The state structures that make anonymous business ownership a paid feature.
2026
No Branches, No Verification, No Problem
How a Colorado licensing carve-out concentrated more than half of all crypto-named money-service-business registrants in a single state.
2025
The Geography of Corporate America
A jurisdictional map of where corporate America incorporates, and why.
Articles
[ article ]2024
Iceberg Sensemaking: A Process Model for Critical Data Analysis and Visualization
A process model for the hidden, below-the-waterline work of critical data analysis, reframed through an interpretivist lens.
2023
Dirty Data in the Newsroom: Comparing Data Preparation in Journalism and Data Science
An ethnography of how journalists and data scientists actually clean data.
2020
Table Scraps: An Actionable Framework for Multi-Table Data Wrangling from an Artifact Study of Computational Journalism
A framework for multi-table data wrangling, drawn from an artifact study of computational journalism notebooks and pipelines.
2019
Knowing Together: An Experiment in Collaborative Photogrammetry
A collaborative 3D-imaging experiment in capturing people, together.
2017
Walter Benjamin and the Question of Print in Media History
Reads Benjamin’s theory of print as a media-history problem — how a technology of reproduction reshapes what counts as culture.
2014
A Brief Introduction to Impact: 'The Meme Font'
A cultural history of Impact as the default meme typeface — how one typeface became the look of internet humor.
Reports
[ report ]2025
Fonts
The annual state of web typography, measured across millions of sites.
2016
Guide to SecureDrop: An Emerging Platform for Secure and Anonymous Communication in Newsrooms
The first published study of the SecureDrop whistleblowing platform.
2016
Teaching Data and Computational Journalism
A curriculum report that shaped data-journalism programs at 116 schools.
Essays
[ essay ]2024
The Drawbridge Model of Cryptographic Communication
Cryptography as a drawbridge on the communications bridge — raising and lowering access without tearing the channel down.
2017
Newsrooms Are Making Leaking Easier — and More Secure — Than Ever
How SecureDrop-era tooling made leaking easier for sources and safer for newsrooms — without trading one for the other.
2016
A Crucial Skill That Most J-Schools Aren't Teaching
Why journalism schools need computational literacy — not as a specialty, but as a core skill for reporting in a data-shaped world.
Launches
[ launch ]2026
Enigma Government Archive
Launch of the Enigma Government Archive — 1,000+ validated public datasets; owned the launch content stack end to end.
Dissertation
[ dissertation ]2019
The Cultural Contradictions of Cryptography
The doctoral dissertation that forms the basis of Cryptographic Amnesia, a cultural history of cryptography in twentieth-century America.