As an Associate Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech, I explore how data shape and are shaped by their settings, through the development of critical methods and theory that challenge the myth of digital universalism. With an interdisciplinary background in architecture, computing, and social research, I bring a spatial perspective to Science and Technology Studies scholarship on data and AI infrastructures.
Data as Experience:
Technologies of Orientation within a Living World (MIT Press 2027)
My forthcoming book explores how data matter experientially: not only for what they show us, but for how they shape our attention and affect, conditioning the way we perceive our surroundings, others, and even ourselves.
Established representational approaches to data, which are centered on objectivity and accuracy, can obscure these experiential dimensions and limit our ability to reflect critically on what data do to us. Data are not simply representations of the world; they are points of orientation within it.
All Data Are Local:
Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society (MIT Press 2019)
My last book, All Data Are Local explains how to analyze “data settings,” not simply data sets. It is available to read through MIT Open Access.
Interdisciplinary Media Arts Center
In addition to my faculty role, I am the executive director of the Interdisciplinary Media Arts Center, which fosters projects and pathways for researchers, students, and practitioners who want to make expressive use of innovative technologies.
Recent News
[2026-2027] Visiting Faculty Fellowship at the Emory Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry.
[2026 Summer] SpatialSTS Field School held at Georgia Tech Library, with a grant from the NSF Program in Science, Technology, and Society.
[2026 Spring] “Plasmatic Visualization: Visceral Attunement to Environmental Data” Ploypilin Pruekcharoen, Sylvia Janicki, Mohsin Yousufi, Miles Appleton, Emily G. Weigel, Yanni Loukissas. Publication (Pictoral) for the 2026 ACM Conference on the Design of Interactive Systems.
[2026 Spring] “Points of Orientation,” a lecture at the Data in Action Symposium, Leslie Humanities Center, Dartmouth College.
[2026 Spring) Interviewed (along with Dr. Sylvia Janicki) on “Lost in the Stacks: The Research Library Rock’n’roll Radio Show” for Episode 669: Scholarship in Place.
[2025 Fall] Received the Infrastructure Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science for “DigitalSTS,” along with collaborators David Ribes, Janet Vertesi, Carl DiSalvo, Laura Forlano, Steven J. Jackson, Daniela K. Rosner, and Hanna Rose Shell.
[2025 Fall] “Professor Yanni Loukissas Is Helping Us See Data Differently,” by Neema Tavakolian. Tech Square News coverage of recent research projects.
[2025 Summer] Interviewed on “The Policy Viz Podcast” with @jschwabish for “Data Are Local: Context, Power, and Storytelling.”
[2025 Summer] Awarded an NSF Grant from the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, with co-PI Richmond Wong to develop a Spatial STS Field School for place-based digital scholarship.
If you are interested in learning more about my work, please send me an email.