Patrick Herron

Research Analyst & Technologist

Patrick Herron is Research Analyst & Technologist for the Jenkins Chair for New Technologies in Society. Patrick's responsibilities in support of the Chair cover a broad range of research and development roles. His current research focuses upon text mining-based innovation analyses with a particular interest in the impact of collaboration, state policy, globalization and financialization on global nanotechnology diffusion, biomedical device histories, memetic genealogies, and the rapidly changing nature of human "reading" resulting from the recent dramatic evolution and diffusion of retrieval and text mining technologies. Patrick's current projects include:

• analyzing the dynamics of the current global nanotechnology research and patent literature (with the Center for Nanotechnology in Society-UCSB, funded by the NSF);
• tracking the diffusion of hate speech and hot-button topics in Twitter networks;
• developing visualizations of intellectual property platform historiographies;
• following the discursive formations of the current "revolution in military affairs;" and
• reading the changing topology of critical theory and new media studies literature.

Patrick's recent book on innovation in the pharmaceutical industry, Text Mining for Genomics-based Drug Discovery (VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller), was published in 2008.

Prior to joining Duke Patrick completed graduate studies in Information Science at UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Library and Information Science. While at UNC Patrick's main research focus was on automated classification and clustering of large heterogeneous consumer health web collections. Most of his research energies concentrated around the development of novel semantic representations of text collections and purely unsupervised learning for machine reading. While at UNC he worked as a web technologies consultant and also as research assistant for ibiblio.org and a developer for SAS, where he authored the global web information architecture schema.

In addition to working as a software developer and web designer for the last ten years Patrick has been steadily proliferating as a poet and multimedia artist. His website proximate.org was the first poetics-based web site to be included in the New Museum for Contemporary Art's Rhizome collection. Patrick is the author of several books of poetry including the acclaimed Be Somebody (2008, Effing Press). Patrick has been innovating at the intersection of electronic media and poetry for over a decade and is the founder of the Carrboro Poetry Festival.

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