Digital Humanities and Internet Research: shared methods and

perspectives

Dr. des. Cornelius PuschmannHeinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf

cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de

European Summer School "Culture & Technology"University of Leipzig

29 July 2009

This is not a project presentation

…but a (subjective) overview of two emerging fields and their relation

Providing context

● I am a postdoc researcher in English linguistics at the University of

Düsseldorf

● my to-date work has focused on what linguists usually call computer-

mediated communication or computer-mediated discourse analysis

(CMC/CMDA)

● I study pragmatic and discourse-related aspects of CMC (e.g. blogs,

Twitter)

● PhD thesis on stylistic variation in corporate weblogs

● additional background in information science and STS

● interested in digital methods, visualization and trends in the

Humanities research agenda

Questions I'll address in this presentation

1) What is the relationship of Internet Research/Internet Studies and

Digital Humanities?

2) What kinds of questions are formulated in Internet Studies and in

what regards are they relevant to DH scholars?

3) How can the philologies benefit from participating in Internet

Studies and what methods and theoretical frameworks can they

contribute?

Internet Research and Internet Studies

Internet StudiesInternet Research

“Internet research is the practice of using the Internet, especially the World Wide Web, for research.”

“Internet studies is a field of academia dealing with the interaction between the Internet and modern society, and the sociological and technological implications on one another.”

→ doing (academic) research via the Internet

→ doing research about the Internet

Digital Humanities engenders Internet Research

Via practices such as...

● sharing rich digital resources (classical manuscripts, cultural

artifacts, 3D models of places)

● using web-based tools (visualization, annotation)

● integrating linked data (RDF-based mashups)

● employing new publishing practices (Open Access, Open Data,

academic blogging)

→ using the Internet is increasingly a social and collaborative activity

and academia is no exception

Internet Studies as a distinct emerging field

● core fields: sociology, social psychology, ethnography

● additional fields: mass communication, political science, religion

studies, library and information science, linguistics, computational

linguistics, literary and cultural studies

● diverse landscape, but the core fields are larger and more strongly

involved

● disciplines traditionally invested into studying artefacts, technologies

and abstract concepts (books, mass media, language) must adjust

more significantly than those that study people and their behavior

Topics in Internet Studies

● Internet architecture/security/technology (identity management,

encryption, spam, viruses)

● sociology of online worlds, communities and networks (SL, WoW, FB,

blogs)

● culture and conventions (netspeak, netiquette, video game culture)

● new forms of communication (chat, microblogging)

● digital rights (privacy, free speech, intellectual property, digital rights

management)

Institutes, societies, journals

● Institutes: Oxford Internet Institute, Internet Interdisciplinary Institute

(IN3, Open University of Catalonia), Berkman Center for Internet and

Society (Harvard), Stanford Law School Center for Internet and

Society, Institute for Internet Studies (Tel Aviv), Singapore Internet

Research Centre

● Societies: Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), German Society

for Online Research (DGOF)

● Journals: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC), First

Monday, Information, Communication and Society

● … and a number of others

Preliminary observations

1) There is a strong bias towards

the Social Sciences in Internet

Studies

2) The philologies are not very

significantly represented

3) This is in spite of our natural

affinity for the kind of data – text –

that analysis of Internet

communication is based on

A few reasons why we should study online communication

● in functionally-oriented linguistics there is no such thing as “too

much data” → Internet is huge

● Internet language data reflects a broad spectrum of speakers and

genres; in some regards “more natural” than other registers

● avenues of research for pragmatics, discourse analysis, applied ling.

● to study the creation, reception and criticism of (popular) culture on

the Web

● to evaluate the impact of techniques such as non-linear storytelling

(e.g. in fan fiction and blogs)

● but most importantly: it's about text!

Internet Studies examples: Twitter

● Twitter (microblogging service)

shares properties of blog and chat

formats

● study by Honeycutt and Herring

(2009) describes topic drift in

threads of dyadic conversation

● coding and visualization of the

data via VisualDTA

Internet Studies examples: use of hyperlinks in blogs

● research by Efimova and

Anjewierden explores link

structure in blogs

● typical: language data and

linking practices are not

correlated

Internet Studies examples: self-linking in blogs

● different visualization techniques enable a panoramic view on the

content

● facilitates computational analyses of language on the Net (e.g. a

visual representation of Biber's multi-dimensional analysis model or

Csomay's Vocabulary-Based Discourse Unit)

Interactive concordance of Barak Obama's inauguration speech

Visualization of token frequency in Marriot on the Move blog

Word frequencies in different registers

Conclusions

● philologists are largely missing from Internet Studies, though their

expertise is direly needed

● qualitative analysis and manual annotation is underexplored

● Internet communication not just another data source (though it can

be used in that way)

● new methods and visualizations needed

● application, refinement and development of theories

Thanks for listening!

Digital Humanities and Internet Research: shared methods and

perspectives

Dr. des. Cornelius PuschmannHeinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf

cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de

European Summer School "Culture & Technology"University of Leipzig

29 July 2009