Digital Humanities
In my work and in my classroom I engage with digital humanities methodologies, including computational and statistical methods. My interest in fan writing as a practice led me by necessity to DH work, as there are hundreds of thousands of stories that I want to be able to attend to substantively. In my classroom, I’ve seen how empowering combining qualitative and quantitative methods can be, as students now more than ever come from differing majors, ready to engage with interdisciplinary research.
DH Research
My book project integrates data I collected from the Archive of our Own on Real Person Fiction written about the actors from the show Supernatural. I used BookNLP to analyze my stories in order to determine differences between how fans write about the actors, versus how they write about the characters from the show proper.
With my collaborators Kiera Obbard and Camilla Holm Soelseth, we used the Zeeschuimer browser extension to curate a dataset of over 900 BookTok videos for analysis. We designed a “lurker method” that intends to work with the algorithms of TikTok in order to better understand the contours of what a BookTok user might reasonably encounter on their FYP. (Publication with Cambridge University Press Forthcoming).
I designed a script for scraping book pages of the book reviewing site “The StoryGraph.” (Publication with MFS forthcoming).
Rhodes Fellowship in the Computational Humanities
My 2022 Fanfiction course was derived from my work with the Rhodes Information Initiative at Duke University. The course aim was to contextualize contemporary fan writing in a longer history of intertextual writing, and to bring in quantitative methods to examine digital fanfiction texts. Approximately half of the students were majoring or had one of their majors in the home department of English, and the other half came to this course from disciplines like engineering, biology, and computer science (with a portion of them double majors between a science and a humanities discipline). The course allowed for an engagement with canonical texts and close reading methodologies perhaps unfamiliar to the students of the sciences, and exposed humanities students to basic coding and data analysis. Those that were double majors were able to blend their skill sets in service of this class. Students of all disciplines had previous knowledge to bring to the table, and the classroom allowed for collaboration and interdisciplinary research integrating quantitative and qualitative methodologies.
Mentoring Student Research: Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism
Is it ethically permissible to sell, buy, and use luxury goods? What labor practices do we tolerate to make these goods available? In this 10-week summer research project, a team of students, led by two faculty leads and myself as a project manager, used word embedding models and sentiment analysis to connect the ethical dimensions of the discourse on consumption with gender, race, and religion. The final product for the project asked students to experiment with interactive visualizations (such as a Shiny app) to track the changes in the language of ethical consumption in our period of interest.
