projects
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Stay Free
2021
Working with whistleblower Edward Snowden, I served as creative and technical lead on a project to create an artwork called “Stay Free,” combining an iconic portrait with the entirety of a landmark court ruling on an NSA mass surveillance program. The artwork sold at auction in 2021 for over $5 million to benefit Freedom of the Press Foundation.
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Cursewords
2019
Cursewords is a full-featured Python terminal client for opening and solving crosswords puzzles, originally developed for my personal use on Linux. Its downs-only mode was featured in a Wall Street Journal article on that solving constraint, and I was interviewed for Beyond Wordplay about it. Ross and I use Cursewords to solve puzzles on our Twitch stream, Cursewords Live.
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FOIA The Dead
2017
FOIA The Dead is a transparency project that automates public records requests to the FBI for subjects of New York Times obituaries. Launched in 2017 and then operated for several years as a Special Project at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, it has released thousands of pages of documents on dozens of notable people, and received coverage in NPR’s Weekend Edition, Note to Self, Newsweek, NiemanLab and more.
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I found the USDA’s Pomological Watercolor Collection online in 2015 and was captivated. After filing a series of FOIA requests about the paintings, I led a successful advocacy campaign to have high-resolution scans put online. I then uploaded the collection to Wikimedia Commons, and developed my first Twitter bot, @pomological to post images from the collection. I spoke about this process at the National Archives during Wikicon 2015, and my work has been written up Mashable (“Twitter’s pleasant ‘old fruit pictures’ bot has a fascinating origin story”), Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere.
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Underground Baseball
2022
Reimagined the logos of Major League Baseball teams in the style of their hometown’s public transit network. “A fun MLB graphic design project,” says Uniwatch.
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Positioned as a work of “historico-cruciverbal” research, Toward A New Understanding of the Honeypot Puzzle Fragments is a print zine of crossword puzzles (with a Spelling Bee twist) created by Ross Trudeau and me. It was released on Kickstarter with over 500 copies sold to backers on 4 continents before launch.
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Cursewords Live
2021–
Cursewords Live is a regular Twitch stream where Ross Trudeau and I solve crossword puzzles in the Cursewords software I develop and construct crosswords live with audience participation.
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@oldroadside
2021
My most popular Twitter bot, @oldroadside posts public domain photographs from the “Roadside America” archive of images donated by John Margolies to the Library of Congress.
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Published crosswords
2020–
After years of solving, in 2020 I began constructing crossword puzzles for submission to the mainstream and independent outlets that run them. Here is a list of published puzzles, with links to solve where available.
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1923
2019
1923 was a year-long zine series consisting of archival material from the year 1923. It was launched on Kickstarter in January of 2019, where the 100 available subscriptions sold out in about two hours. The series was accessioned into Harvard’s Houghton Library, and the 2022 site relaunch got a nice write-up from Mathew Ingram. “god, I wish the internet were more like this” —Lili Loofbourow
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@78_sampler
2017–
The @78_sampler Twitter bot pulls from the Internet Archive’s massive collection of digitized 78rpm records. After releasing the bot in 2017, I gave it a substantial overhaul in 2020, using OpenCV to find the actual labels in the record images and animate a spinning disk. The source code for this project is available on Github.