Digital Humanities Commons^™

Entering The Digital Commons: Using Affinity Spaces To Foster Authentic Digital Writing In Online And Traditional Writing Courses, Jeffrey Bergin

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

Despite the fact that the field of rhetoric and composition has been closely allied to the digital humanities for many years, instructors in these disciplines often remain on their own in terms of adopting, implementing, and evaluating digital technologies. While theoretical scholarship in digital rhetoric is advancing, instructional practices lag behind. Surveying 72 doctoral-granting rhetoric and composition programs, researchers found innovation in the implementation of new media comes primarily from solitary instructors (Anderson and McKee, 74). This article presents several ways in which writing instructors can leverage digital spaces to improve their pedagogies. In particular, the article focuses on digital …

Going Public: How And Why To Develop A Digital Scholarly Identity, Katina Rogers, Lisa M. Rhody, Danica Savonick, Lisa Tagliaferri

Publications and Research

Establishing a meaningful digital identity is essential to managing one’s scholarly and professional reputation. This workshop addresses ways to cultivate an online identity and offers guidance on “going public” using tools and strategies for building a community around your work. Topics include social media, writing for different audiences, personal websites, digital dissertations, and more.

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

Beyond Academic Twitter: Social Media And The Evolution Of Scholarly Publication, Leila Walker

Publications and Research

This articles examines how ongoing developments in social media have intersect with academic publishing practices. It is part of a series addressing the issue of scholarly and academic recognition of digital work. The goal is to investigate how digital work is regarded and produced in today’s academy.

Digital Photography As Experience Artifact, Ryan V. Brennan

Theses and Dissertations

Through the screen interface, the boundary between personal and collective experience is being redefined both spatially and temporally. Here, memories are given independent mediated existence, taking form in digital photographic artifacts that can be communally shared and manipulated into a synthetic continuum.

Isis Rhetoric: A War Of Online Videos, Kathryn Mcdearis

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

In an attempt to combat ISIS recruitment videos, the United States Department of State (USDS) developed the Think Again, Turn Away social media campaign featuring videos attempting to persuade viewers to resist the message of ISIS. In the article “U.S. government: A war of online video propaganda,” authors William Allendorfer and Susan Herring (2015) analyze the textual rhetoric of the ISIS video series Flames of War in comparison to eight Think Again, Turn Away videos. To add to Allendorfer and Herring’s (2015) textual analysis, this study uses the framework of scholar David Blakesley’s (2004) four elements of film rhetoric ( …

Wikia: Between Documentary Simulacra And Documented Fictions, Caroline Courbières, Sabine Roux

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Wikis are digital community spaces that have attracted high traffic but virtually no study as socio-communicational platforms. These platforms offer individuals the possibility of engaging in unique writing activities by defining a distinct material configuration and imposing a protocol of enunciation. Wikis are platforms developed through the contributions of anyone, and constitute collaborative encyclopedias dedicated to a cultural topic. This article more specifically examines the Harry Potter Wiki, which is devoted to the literary universe of J.K. Rowling. Our semio-communicational analysis concerns the structure, the authors and the contents of the French and Anglo-Saxon versions of this wiki. First we …

The New Gatekeepers: How Blogs Subverted Mainstream Book Reviews, Rebecca E. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Book reviewing has a fraught history in the United States. Reviewers have long been accused of not being analytical enough. It should be no wonder then with the emergence of social media that online book reviewing has become increasingly popular. Online reviewers, especially book bloggers, are no literary gatekeepers in their own right, shaping the tastes of readers across the world. Book blogs in particular pay special attention to titles which have long been derided by institutions such as libraries, academia, publishers, and bookstores. These literary gatekeepers typically ignore romance, fantasy, mystery, science fiction, young adult fiction, comic books, and …

Google's #Freeandopen Campaign: Using A Documentary To Raise Awareness Of Internet Regulation Among University Students, Shelby N. Rice

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The internet was founded as a non-proprietary tool by which computers could connect and share information reciprocally. This philosophy has allowed the internet to become a fundamental resource in higher education and provides a window by which students can experience the world around them. The primary focus of The #freeandopen Documentary is to maintain an uncensored web by raising awareness of the forces that act against the freedom of the internet and of the resources available to contribute to the cause. The short, 13-minute documentary is funded by Google’s #freeandopen Microgrant of $2,000. It features interviews from students who are …

Social Media & Audience Participation In Regard To Television, Jean Marie Mcbride

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Jean McBride

Major: Communications: Radio/TV Broadcasting & Mass Media Production

Project Sponsor: Dr. Sylvia White

Number of Project Credits: 3

Social Media & Audience Participation in Regard to Television

The purpose of my honors project was seeing if social media had an influence on television show ratings and popularity by incorporating audience participation. Especially in regards to television shows that have been around for years, I was interested to see if television ratings went up when using Twitter compared to when they did not use Twitter to increase viewers and audience participation. I surveyed forty-nine collegiate women between the ages …

Social Media, Fandom And Language Learning: A Roundtable With Shannon Sauro And Steven L. Thorne, Dean Wang, Shannon Sauro, Steven L. Thorne

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Last November, Dr. Shannon Sauro and Dr. Steven L. Thorne visited the UAB campus to give lectures on, respectively, ‘Fandom, Social Media and Learning’ and ‘Human development and semiotic remediation through mobile place-based gaming’. (. . . ) Questions and responses are transcribed here.

Methodology For Creating Digital Scholarship Projects, Charles W. Kann

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Colloquium talk describing a methodology for creating Digital Scholarship projects.