Syllabus

NEH Understanding Digital Culture:

Humanist Lenses for Internet Research 

Workshop Syllabus

Summer 2020

University of Central Florida

Description

From fan communities and discourse about works of literature to meme-makers skewering cultural objects, online spaces enable readership, creation, circulation, and transformation of humanists 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, and therefore the Understanding Digital Culture workshop, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, fostered a transdisciplinary approach to provide resources, training, and a community of collaborators designed to engage both computational network and data analysis tools, as well as the ethics and best practices of web research. 

The original one-week intensive workshop has been translated into 5 modules designed to aid participants in defining and pursuing individual research questions. Throughout this workshop, participants will be introduced to readings intended to enhance their understanding of digital cultural research, as well as tools and approaches for both collecting and analyzing data from social platforms. The assignments for this workshop are scaffolded to familiarize participants with relevant scholarship, tools, and ethical considerations related to internet research.

Assignments

Discussions

Participants will be expected to participate in 9 asynchronous discussions with their assigned research group throughout the workshop. Participants will receive a prompt containing the specific details of the content they are expected to post (i.e. questions, progress, screenshots, etc.). 

GitHub Repository Creation

This assignment asks participants to demonstrate a basic understanding of the GitHub platform by creating a repository, writing and saving their research questions, and pushing their content to GitHub. Participants will then submit a link to their new repository. 

Data Scraping

Throughout the workshop, participants will be asked to practice using data scrapers for a variety of platforms, and to apply these tools to collect data for their research project. These assignments ask participants to submit screenshots of their data gathering process for each assignment.

    • Preliminary Data Collection

For this assignment, participants will begin collecting the data they need to answer their research questions. Participants can choose to collect data from Twitter or Reddit using the TAGs tool, or from YouTube using YouTube data tools. 

    • Reddit Scraping

For this assignment, participants will use command line tools to scrape data from Reddit. Participants will need to install Python, clone a GitHub repository, and scrape a specific subreddit using a command of their creation. 

    • Advanced Scraping

This assignment asks participants to choose between three potential scrapers (Instagram, Archive of Our Own, or Facebook), read the ReadMe, and perform a scrape using command line instructions. 

Data Visualization 

Participants will be asked to create a visualization from the data they’ve gathered about their research question. They can choose either Gephi or Orange for their visualization; alongside their visualization, participants will justify their choice of visualization software and explain what they learned about their research question as a result of creating the visualization.

Making Bots

Using instructions from Dr. Flores, participants will create their own bot, add images, and submit the bot’s handle. 

Schedule

Module One: Platforms

1.1 Intro to Platforms

1.2 Twitter and YouTube

    • Readings:
        • Navar-Gill, Annemarie, and Mel Stanfill. “‘We Shouldn’t Have to Trend to Make you Listen’: Queer Fan Hashtag Campaigns as Production Interventions.” Journal of Film and Video.
        • Steele, Catherine Knight. “Black Bloggers and their Varied Publics: The Everyday Politics of Black Discourse Online.” Television & New Media 19, 2 (2018): 112-127. doi: 10.1177/1527476417709535
    • Materials:
    • Assignments:

1.3 Reddit and GitHub

Module Two: Ethics of Digital Research

2.1 Intro to Digital Ethics

2.2 Platform Literacy

2.3 Best Practices

Module Three: Digital Research Methods

3.1 Intro to Data Tools

    • Readings:
        • Baym, Nancy K “What Constitutes Quality in Qualitative Internet Research?” In Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, edited by Nancy K. Baym and Annette M. Markham, 173-189. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2009.
        • Baym, Nancy K., and Annette M. Markham (eds). “Introduction: Making Smart Choices on Shifting Ground.” In Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, vii-xix. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2009.
        • boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford. “Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological and Scholarly Phenomenon.” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 662-79. 
    • Materials:
    • Assignments:

3.2 Data Tools: Twitter and YouTube

3.3 Data Tools: Reddit and GitHub

3.4 Document Driven Research

    • Readings:
        • Bénel, Aurélien and Christophe Lejeune, Christophe. “Humanities 2.0: Documents, Interpretation and Intersubjectivity in the Digital Age.” International Journal of Web Based Communities 5 (2019): 562-576.
        • Drouin, Jeffrey. “Close- and Distant-Reading Modernism: Network Analysis, Text Mining, and Teaching the Little Review.” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies:Special Issue Visualizing Periodical Networks 5, 1 (2014): 110-135.
        • Gitelman, Lisa. “Introduction: Paper Knowledge.” In Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, 1-20. Duke UP, 2014.
    • Materials:
    • Assignments:

Module Four: Visualization/Analysis

4.1 Intro to Data Visualization

4.2 Intro to Orange

4.3 Intro to Gephi

4.4 Data Analysis

Module Five: Bots

5.1 Intro and Making Bots