My name is Sands Fish. I am currently a first year master’s student in the Media Arts and Sciences program at the MIT Media Lab. I work under Ethan Zuckerman in the MIT Center for Civic Media as a Research Assistant, primarily focused on the Media Cloud platform. I design data visualizations that reveal hidden patterns in the content and structure of the news at large scales. My current efforts are in detecting conversations and frames in issues discussed online, anywhere from main stream media to citizen blogs. This effort (initially called a “Network of Frames”) is a network visualization that represents media sources and the words they use most frequently. The network shows common usages of words between different media sources and the layout of the network highlights clusters of language, indicating at the very least themes emerging from overall coverage of the issue. Before arriving at the Media Lab, I worked as a fellow and researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and as a senior software engineer and data scientist at the MIT Libraries.

In my role as a designer and artist, I focus on using generative visuals, artificial intelligence, and hardware interfaces to expose beauty and intricacy in patterns from the natural and digital world. I am also one of the organizers of the Cambridge/Somerville based Tech Poetics community; a loose collection of new media and technology artists in the greater Boston area practicing or interested in the use of technology (loosely defined) in their artistic practice.

You can find me on Twitter at @sandsfish and my home on the web is http://sands.fish.