My main interest is in how people glean or create meanings from contextual clues and patterns. Such cognitive parsing usually calls upon implicit and embedded as well as explicit information; it happens when people know how to act in a social situation, perform a task, or converse in a natural language. I ask questions like: How do people go about navigating a piece of writing, a painting, or a computer interface? How do they carry out a large goal by performing a series of more specific actions?

I worked on these areas as a literary scholar from 1984-2000, and in the field of website and software design from 2000-2024.

If you are looking for my academic work, please go to http://www.emerysnyder.org. Thank you!