Mike Edwards

I grew up with librarians' books and an Atari 800. When I was young I brushed up against COBOL and Fortran and BASIC and Pascal and Lisp. I joined the Army and drove trucks and figured out I could get things done. I competed for teaching assistant funding as a graduate student and found myself in front of a composition classroom. I learned Latin well enough to read Cicero but not well enough to read Tacitus. I realized I was a feminist. I wrote a dissertation about digital technology and economic inequality. I petted cats and volunteered at a no-kill shelter. I got a starter academic job and deployed to OEF and helped the Afghans rebuild their systems of higher education, including promoting education for Afghan women. I got involved with veterans' initiatives and then with intellectual property initiatives in my professional organization. I realized that I kept coming back to issues of economic inequality, and pursued the economic angle. And I came back, again, to technology, and the economics of digital inequality. Today, I read poetry to my young son Malcolm and pet the cats — Tink, Zeugma, Tash — and cook stews and soups, and Lauralea tries to teach me about data analytics. Sometimes I build databases or write stories, knowing that those two activities are isomorphic.