About

I am a researcher, writer, and educator based in British Columbia, Canada. I hold a Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from Princeton University, where I completed an award-winning dissertation on the history of Japan’s modern shipping industry, and I teach courses on Japanese and Asian history at the University of British Columbia. My research is based on the analysis of archival documents (government papers, business reports, newspaper articles, etc.), as well as quantitative methods such as network analysis and text mining.

I am endlessly fascinated by languages, both natural and otherwise. My core research languages are Japanese and Chinese, and I have a reading knowledge of French. When it comes to programming, I am most comfortable working in Python, but I also have experience with R (for statistics and data visualization), Haskell, Ruby, JavaScript, and SQL, among other languages.

I enjoy making and customizing open-source tools, particularly for use when writing. I’ve written about these tools on this site, and my open source projects are available on GitHub. My current go-to writing tools are Vim, Markdown (CommonMark and Pandoc), and reStructuredText (Docutils and Sphinx). I also use LaTeX (typically LuaLaTeX) for polished PDFs or when I’m writing something heavy on mathematics. I created this website with custom HTML templates and CSS style sheets, and a simple static site generator that I wrote in Python.