Welcome...
This is the online portfolio for Christin Gulick Phelps. I am a PhD student in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at North Carolina State University. I hold a master’s degree in Technical Communication also from North Carolina State University and a bachelor's degree in Computer Information Systems from Guilford College in Greensboro, NC. When school is not in session, I work for Virante, Inc developing websites, maintaining affiliate programs, and assisting with search engine optimization for clients.
A bit about me...
When I was around thirteen years old, I took a look at my high school's website and frowned. My beloved school's site was, well, not very good. So, the next semester I enrolled in a web design independent study to attempt to fix it, and that class forever changed my life. It was during that next semester that I realized my love of the Internet. Although created by man, I came to believe that the Internet is not a digital reality, but a new reality with untouched potential. I came to wonder why this thing, this new invention had changed the world so much in so short of time. The way we communicate online and how that impacts our communication in the so-called 'real world' continues to interest me to this day. It is this fascination that led me to study computers at Guilford and later enroll in graduate school.
I believe that my 10 years of experience developing and maintaining websites for both small businesses and academic institutions greatly informs my research. I have developed and nurtured my skills in ASP, PHP, VBScript, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and Database Administration throughout graduate school because I feel that in order to fully understand the Internet, I must also understand how the Internet and websites work from the inside out.
Combining my love of communication with programming, I find my research to be very interdisciplinary, pulling from English, Communication, Design, Computer Science, and Business. My recent research has included whether or not artificial intelligence can be considered a legitimate rhetorical audience, how technology alters our perceptions of space, and the ways in which human beings use search engines to locate information.