Debates in the Digital Humanities by Matthew K Gold, ed University of Minnesota Press 2012 516 pages ISBN: 978-0-8166-7795-5 (paperback) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 2008, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) established the Office of Digital Humanities to provide grant funding for research in the new academic field of the digital humanities, an indication that DH (as practitioners call it) had moved out of the margins of the academy One of the projects that the NEH has funded is Looking for Whitman: The Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman, which brings students and faculty in five courses from four universities together in "a multi-campus experiment in digital pedagogy" to study the work of the 19th-century American poet One of the leaders of this experiment in pedagogy, Matthew Gold, is the editor of the comprehensive collection of essays, Debates in the Digital Humanities In an essay on Looking for Whitman, Gold states succinctly the implications of the digital humanities: "the radical potential of projects like Looking for Whitman--and perhaps of digital humanities pedagogy more generally--lies in their ability to connect learners in ways that hack around the artificial boundaries of selectivity and elitism that educational institutions have long erected around themselves" (p 407) The use of the word "hack" in relation to the digital humanities is strategic, connoting subversive, unauthorized action against the status quo, a theme that runs throughout the volume If you have never heard of the digital humanities, you will find yourself longing for specific examples like Looking for Whitman as you read the first 200 pages of Debates in the Digital Humanities The book is organized in six parts, including both essays and blog posts on each topic--defining, theorizing, critiquing, practicing, teaching, and envisioning the future of the digital humanities "Part I: Defining the Digital Humanities" is more successful in illustrating the challenge of defining the discipline than it is in providing an authoritative definition, leading the reader in circles around the question, "What is DH?" "Let's be honest," states Rafael Alvarado in a reprinted blog post, "there is no definition of digital humanities" (p 50) Confirming the reader's impression, Alvarado says that DH "has nearly as many definitions as affiliates" (p 50) In spite of its vagueness, perhaps the most helpful definition is provided by Matthew Kirschenbaum as he quotes from Wikipedia: "The digital humanities is a field of study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities" (p 4) The digital humanities, formerly known as humanities computing, traces its origins to the work of Father Roberto Busa (1913-2011), an Italian Jesuit priest who in 1949 initiated with IBM a 30-year project to digitize the complete works of St Thomas Aquinas in a searchable database In the last decade, advances in computing (eg, wikis, social networking, crowdsourcing, GPS) have created tools that are redefining the research and teaching in history, linguistics, and literary criticism "Part IV: Practicing the Digital Humanities" and "Part V: Teaching the Digital Humanities" provide compelling illustrations of DH at work and are probably better starting points for outsiders to the field since they include excellent illustrations of the applications of the digital humanities One of the results of the digitization of literary texts has been to facilitate the work of the literary critic When I was an English major in the 1980s, I would have to manually cull through a novel like Melville's Moby-Dick page by page looking for references, for example, to "whiteness," a recurring motif in the novel with thematic significance Once I had identified key references to whiteness, I would then review each relevant passage carefully in order to interpret Melville's use of the motif and its relation to the larger theme of racial difference, a preoccupation in pre-Civil War America …

Debates in the Digital Humanities

Background: Social media provides a context for billions of users to connect, express sentiments, and provide in-the-moment status updates. Because Twitter users tend to tweet emotional updates from daily life, the platform provides unique insights into experiences of mental health problems. Depression is not only one of the most prevalent health conditions but also carries a social stigma. Yet, opening up about one’s depression and seeking social support may provide relief from symptoms. Objective: The aim of this study was to examine the public discourse of the trending hashtag #MyDepressionLooksLike to look more closely at how users talk about their depressive symptoms on Twitter. Methods: We captured 3225 original content tweets for the hashtag #MyDepressionLooksLike that circulated in May of 2016. Eliminating public service announcements, spam, and tweets with links to pictures or videos resulted in a total of 1978 tweets. Using qualitative content analysis, we coded the tweets to detect themes. Results: The content analysis revealed seven themes: dysfunctional thoughts, lifestyle challenges, social struggles, hiding behind a mask, apathy and sadness, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and seeking relief. Conclusions: The themes revealed important information about the content of the public messages that people share about depression on Twitter. More research is needed to understand the effects of the hashtag on increasing social support for users and reducing social stigma related to depression. [JMIR Ment Health 2017;4(4):e43]

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#MyDepressionLooksLike: Examining Public Discourse About Depression on Twitter

This article explores intersections between place, race/ethnicity, and gender amongst American Twitter users and makes an argument that studying the intensity of tweets provides insights into how and why particular groups tweet. Given recent events in American political life such as the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri and the reactions by young, urban African Americans on Twitter, understanding the role of race, place, gender, and age is important. We observed the time between tweets of urban American Twitter users and explored whether the medium may be providing traditionally marginalized groups, such as young Black men, with potential avenues for mobilizing communication and access to resources.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jcc4.12144

Urban Social Media Demographics: An Exploration of Twitter Use in Major American Cities

Employing a number of different standalone programs is a prevalent approach among communication scholars who use computational methods to analyze media content. For instance, a researcher might use...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/19312458.2018.1447655

Scaling up Content Analysis

This study explores the nature of how mobile social media may potentially be sharpening the tenor of communicating online. Specifically, randomized representative Twitter data were collected for se...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2056305116677137

Meaner on Mobile: Incivility and Impoliteness in Communicating Contentious Politics on Sociotechnical Networks:

Using Twitter as a case study, this article hypothesizes that social media content that is produced on mobile versus web platforms may be qualitatively different. As we increasingly tweet from our smartphones, we may be encouraged to “report” on our immediate thoughts, feelings, physical self, and surroundings. This article seeks to understand whether these presentations of self tend to be more egocentric, negative/positive, gendered, or communal depending on whether they were tweeted from mobile devices or web platforms. Using 6 weeks of Twitter data collected in 2013, we found evidence that users tweet differently from mobile devices and that mobile tweeting is informing new behaviors, attitudes, and linguistic styles online.

Do We Tweet Differently From Our Mobile Devices? A Study of Language Differences on Mobile and Web‐Based Twitter Platforms

Though full of promise, Big Data research success is often contingent on access to the newest, most advanced, and often expensive hardware systems and the expertise needed to build and implement such systems. As a result, the accessibility of the growing number of Big Data-capable technology solutions has often been the preserve of business analytics. Pay as you store/process services like Amazon Web Services have opened up possibilities for smaller scale Big Data projects. There is high demand for this type of research in the digital humanities and digital sociology, for example. However, scholars are increasingly finding themselves at a disadvantage as available data sets of interest continue to grow in size and complexity. Without a large amount of funding or the ability to form interdisciplinary partnerships, only a select few find themselves in the position to successfully engage Big Data. This article identifies several notable and popular Big Data technologies typically implemented using large and ...

/pdf/big-data-solutions-on-a-small-scale-evaluating-accessible-2hlfk0tnbv.pdf

Sawyer Bowman

Papers

Do We Tweet Differently From Our Mobile Devices? A Study of Language Differences on Mobile and Web‐Based Twitter Platforms

Big Data solutions on a small scale: Evaluating accessible high-performance computing for social research