Kris Shaffer, Ph.D. (Yale University, 2011), is an Instructional Technology Specialist and Adjunct Instructor of Computer Science and Digital Studies at the University of Mary Washington. He is also a Contributing Editor for Hybrid Pedagogy and the lead author and editor of Open Music Theory.

Kris is a data scientist with a background in computational musicology, a digital media specialist, a software developer, and a published author. Recently, he has been developing open-source software and analytics tools for education, particularly in the context of critical digital pedagogy, open educational resources (OER), and UMW's Domain of One's Own initiative.

Explore Kris's projects, articles, and essays below. Or visit the complete blog archive or his GitHub profile.

featured projects

DoOO Analytics

Public dashboard and private analytics reports for Domain of One's Own.

DoOO Corpus

Mining and analyzing text from 300+ articles about Domain of One's Own worldwide.

BB-Cluster

Using Markov models and K-means cluster analysis to analyze harmonic practices in the McGill Billboard dataset.

Peasy

Super-simple content management system designed for open-licensed content.

Lieder Project

Exploring the relationship between phonetic and musical patterns in 19th-c. German music.

Web Annotations

Hypothes.is aggregator embeds hypothes.is annotations on WordPress pages and posts.

featured article

Truthy Lies and Surreal Truths: A Plea for Critical Digital Literacies

Misinformation abounds. This has always been the case, but the problem has become acute in the age of digital communication. As Mike Caulfield and Zeynep Tufekci have been showing in the week following the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook is particularly susceptible to this problem. Of course, Facebook is not alone. The ease with which we can share “news” on social media platforms makes it increasingly easy to contribute to the virality of falsehoods. Take this video, which reached viral status on Twitter. Those who passed it along claimed it was a video of anti-Trump protests in Los Angeles, but is really a video of an anti-Maduro protest in Venezuela.