So I have been thinking more and more about my dissertation, and what to do with it. At first, I really resisted the idea of publishing it. That genre of academic writing, which I mimed as a learning exercise, feels inauthentic to me in the end. When I look at those pages I see an attempt to fit a type of mold that doesn't reflect my energies or my intentions as a writer.

Something more authentic would be terse and mobile, moving from one idea to the next with a clear goal structuring the progress. It would not be typical, longform academic writing, but it would be just as deeply researched. Notes and perhaps a glossary would be encoded in an interesting way, maybe in the margins, with more dense theoretical information in the back. I imagine something between a tutorial and a manifesto, where each chapter takes up one computational concept, like text analysis or text encoding, and guides the reader through a queer inflected methodology for using that tool.

Here's an outline of the chapters:

• text analysis

• data formats

• interface effects

• artificial intelligence

In analyzing the tools, the chapters would in turn explore concepts theorized by Queer Studies, Black Feminist Studies, and Trans Studies, like Gender Performativity, Dis-identifcation, Surface Aesthetics, and Transphobia. I would want to find perhaps a tighter way of tying these concepts together, because they do go in all directions.

The main argument of the book is that computational structures create power structures that reduce the complexity of real world subjects. But we can resist that reduction by re-deploying its own logic against it. Taking up the same process but with a slight difference. This is an old argument, of course.