There has been growing awareness of the need for humanist inquiry into the internet platforms and communities driving contemporary culture. From fan communities and discourse about works of literature to meme-makers skewering cultural objects, online spaces enable readership, creation, circulation, and transformation of humanist texts—and the active making and remaking of public history. However, much internet research is driven by computational approaches without also being rigorously grounded in theories of culture and textual production. Navigating this space can be particularly daunting to early-career humanities scholars. This is where we seek to intervene, both through the original NEH-funded Institute and this open access edition of the materials.
Understanding Digital Culture: Humanist Lenses for Internet Research aims to increase the number of humanities scholars using digital tools for data collection and analysis in internet research. Drawing on the expertise of an interdisciplinary community of humanities scholars spanning digital humanities, information studies, American studies, fan studies, cultural studies, media studies, and games studies Understanding Digital Culture modules enable sharing ideas and methods for using digital technologies to advance humanities research and teaching. Specifically, we provide resources, training, and a community of collaborators to engage both computational network and data analysis tools and the ethics and best practices of using the web as a site of research.
While the overall arc of the workshop will emphasize developing transdisciplinary research questions and methodologies, individual modules will emphasize developing computational and procedural methods through gaining comfort with specific tools. Each day, participants will advance on their own project, working towards defining a clear theoretical framework and ethics plan while performing their initial data collection and analysis. Participants will leave with a solid foundation for developing both future research plans and their own pedagogical applications.
The original workshop modules have been revised and organized by topic. The entire workshop can be integrated into a course (with modules lasting a week or more, depending on the audience and needs of the participants) or used in part for specific tools or areas of knowledge. All materials included are Creative Commons licensed and can be adapted and expanded upon by the instructor.
About the Faculty
Dr. Anastasia Salter is the Director of Graduate Programs for the College of Arts and Humanities, including the innovative interdisciplinary doctoral program in Texts & Technology., and author of five books that draw on humanities methods alongside computational discourse and subjects, including most recently Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider (Bloomsbury 2019, w/ Aaron Reed and John Murray), Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media (Palgrave Macmillan 2017, w/ Bridget Blodgett), and Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, Hidden Objects (Bloomsbury 2017). Dr. Salter is a former writer for ProfHacker, a blog on technology and pedagogy formerly hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education, and has taught workshops around the world bringing computational methods and interaction design to interdisciplinary humanist audiences.
Dr. Mel Stanfill is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Texts & Technology PhD and the Department of Games and Interactive Media. They have published about internet research methods and using internet research methods in venues such as New Media and Society and the Journal of Film and Video, and authored Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans ( University of Iowa Press 2019). Dr. Stanfill is currently a participant on a collaborative, transdisciplinary DARPA-funded project researching cross-platform social media.
Dr. Amy Larner Giroux is Associate Director of UCF’s Center for Humanities and Digital Research and a Digital Historian for the National Cemetery Administration. She received her doctorate in Texts and Technology from UCF and has over 30 years’ experience in software development and project management. Dr. Giroux assists faculty and graduate students on their research projects by leveraging open-source programs such as Orange and Gephi. She has analyzed historic newspapers using Orange to evaluate the discourse surrounding immigrant farm workers in the early 20th century.
Dr. Stephanie Vie is department chair of the Department of Writing and Rhetoric (DWR) at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. She has been interviewed by national and international media outlets regarding social media, privacy, and the use of hashtags for digital activist efforts. Her research has appeared in such journals as Composition Forum; Computers and Composition; Computers and Composition Online; First Monday; Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; and Technical Communication Quarterly, among others. She co-edited Social Writing/Social Media (The WAC Clearinghouse/University Press of Colorado, 2017).
Dr. Jennifer de Winter has long been interested in how culture (which is local) moves internationally. She has spent a number of years analyzing anime, comics, and computer games as part of global media flows in order to understand how concepts such as “art,” “culture,” and “entertainment” are negotiated. In 2003, Professor deWinter joined the Learning Games Initiative, a group of scholars and game designers dedicated to the general study of games and the use of games to teach concepts and skills in particular. Since joining WPI, she has been an active faculty member in the Interactive Media Game Development program, advising students and teaching courses in game theory and practice.
Dr. Leonardo Flores is Chairperson and Professor in the Department of English at Appalachian State University and Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization. He was the 2012-2013 Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. His research areas are electronic literature and its preservation via criticism, documentation, and digital archives. He is the creator of a scholarly blogging project titled I ♥ E-Poetry, co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3, and has a Spanish language e-lit column in 80 Grados. He is currently co-editing the first Anthology of Latin American Electronic Literature. For more information on his current work, visit http://leonardoflores.net. His passion for e-lit and bots shines through in his Twitter account @Leonardo_UPRM.
Dr. Bridget Blodgett is an associate professor and chair of the Division of Science, Information Arts, and Technology at the University of Baltimore. Her research analyzes Internet culture and the social impacts thereof on offline life. Her current research takes a critical eye to online game communities regarding gender, inclusiveness, and identity. Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media (with Anastasia Salter) was released in 2017 by Palgrave MacMillan and is the summation of this work to date.
Dr. Catherine Knight Steele, a scholar of race, gender and media with specific focus on African American culture and discourse in traditional and new media, is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland. Her research has appeared in such journals as Television and New Media, Social Media + Society and Information, Communication and Society. She is currently working on a monograph about digital black feminism and new media technologies. Dr. Steele also served as the first Project Director for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Synergies among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture project (AADHum).
Dr. Louise Kane is Assistant Professor of Global Modernisms in the Department of English at UCF. Her dissertation proposed the use of approaches drawn from Digital Humanities, math, and network analysis to theorize new ways of reading early 1900s magazines and ‘unreadable’ archival materials. Her research on digital rhetorics, network visualization, and computer science related approaches to literary study has been published in The Journal for Modern Periodical Studies and the forthcoming Teaching Modernist Women Writers MLA textbook.
