The design of an international social media event: a day in the life of the digital humanities

The Digital Anthropocene, Deep Mapping, and Environmental Humanities' Big Data Charles Travis (bio) Over the past two hundred years, the development of the steam engine, the mass burning of coal during the Industrial Revolution, the detonation of the atomic bomb in 1945, and global carbon dioxide emissions over the last half century are all manifestations of human-technological agencies that have culminated into a cultural crisis ushering us out of the Holocene and into the Anthropocene. As we advance into the twenty-first century, our use of social media, smartphones and smart-watches, X-Boxes, tablets, and laptops have transformed us into living, breathing remote sensors and unwitting environmental actors. We are now spawning digital wildfires; churning out oceans of big data; and in our quotidian existences, inaugurating what can be called the digital Anthropocene. This confluence of the digital revolution, the dilemma of climate change, and sociopolitical agency and violence has us reconsidering human-environmental relations by raising questions about the interplay between digital, social, psychological, built, and natural landscapes. As Finn Arne Jørgensen notes, the "idea of nature is becoming very hard to separate from the digital tools and media we use to observe, interpret, and manage it" (2014, 109). The intermeshing of analogue, digital, and natural environments captures this new human dispensation and was presciently anticipated by political theorist Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future: "The world we have come to live in, however, is much more determined by man acting into nature, creating [End Page 172] natural processes and directing them into the human artifice and the realm of human affairs" (1961, 59). Arendt's phenomenological thought resonates with the "wicked problems," "humanities innovations," and "interdependencies" articulated by the "Common Threads" page of the Andrew W. Mellon–funded Humanities for the Environment project. This essay will discuss a technophenomenological deep mapping of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) to explore how the novel and its traces of the Odyssey and the Inferno, when scripted digitally, enabled big-data social media performances at Bloomsday in contemporary Dublin. Spanning the classical, medieval, and modern eras, the arc of works composed by Homer, Dante, and Joyce, approximate the "three humanisms" of occidental history posited by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s (the rediscovery of the Greco-Roman, the repurposing of the humanistic perspective, and the discovery of everyday experience). Currently, digital humanism, coined by Milad Doueihi (2013), acts as a fourth convergence of the world's complex cultural heritage and technology and is changing relations between territory, knowledge, and habitat. This underscores the salience of Bethany Nowviskie's observation that the "rhetorical, technological, aesthetic, and deeply personal, sometimes even sentimental, struggles brought into focus by the Anthropocene […] prompt us to position the work of the digital humanities in time" (2014). The digital humanities' first wave (1980s–2010) witnessed the digitization of historical, cultural, literary, and artistic collections, facilitating online research methods and pedagogy, which dovetailed with a second wave (2002–2012) of humanities-computing quantification exercises, digital parsing, analysis, and visualization projects. Currently, a third wave (2012–2020) is cresting with the ontological tide turning, as humanities discourses and tropes are now beginning to shape emerging coding and software applications. The digital and environmental humanities are coming into league with smartphone applications, gaming platforms, tablets, and the visual and performing arts to force trans-disciplinary encounters between fields as diverse as human cognition, environmental studies, genetics, bioinformatics, linguistics, gaming, architecture, philosophy, social media, literature, painting, and history (MacTavish and Rockwell 2006; Liu and Thomas 2012; Travis 2015). Influenced by narrative, storytelling, cinematic, gaming, and network analysis techniques, these digital and environmental humanities practices represent the fluidity of human-environmental symbiosis captured [End Page 173] by the concept of the Anthropocene, in contrast to the static snapshots of human-environmental binaries portrayed within the frame of the Holocene. Nowviskie states that there is a strong possibility for connecting such "technologies and patterns of work in the humanities to deep time: both to times long past and very far in prospect" (2014). Similar lessons in how to plumb the depths of the Anthropocene can be learned from the Native American writer William Least Heat-Moon, who first employed deep...

Racial conflicts have become even more prevalent than before. As a result, social media companies are continuously being slammed for their inadequate response to the problem caused by racial discrimination. For example, the year 2020 witnessed a worldwide movement calling for racial equality and justice. The movement began after an African American male was suffocated and murdered by an NYPD police officer. Since then, there has been significant research efforts focusing on social media and the role it has played in amplifying racism. Similarly, the government of the United Kingdom have threatened to make social media companies legally accountable for the racist content on their platform after the witnessed increase of racist abuse on footballers in 2021. English football clubs have also threatened a boycott of social media in a bid to eradicate online hate. To solve this problem, we will track down past events and social media trends which are likely to have triggered racist reactions and retrieve annotated comments from public social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok. We will create an unbiased dataset of racist comments across social media platforms. We will be building a classification model using machine learning to detect racist comments on social media platforms. We propose a machine learning model for the automatic detection of racist comment across social media platforms. The results we obtained from our research shows that the support vector machine-trained model performs the best with an accuracy of 88.19%. The models proposed in this research outperformed most of the pre-existing models for the same task. Keywords: Race, Racism, Cyberbully, Hate Speech, Support Vector Machine, Confusion Matrix Journal Reference Format: Allenotor, D. & Oyemade, D. A. (2021): A Classification Model Based on Machine Learning for Detecting Racist Comments on Social Media Platforms Journal of Behavioural Informatics, Digital Humanities and Development Research. Vol. 7.No. 1, Pp 121-136. ICT University USA Endowed Research Series Publication in collaboration with SMART-Africa. Available online at https://www.isteams.net.behavioraljournal. Article DOI No - dx.doi.org/10.22624/AIMS/BHI/V7N1P9

Lists and Social MediaLists have long been an ordering mechanism for computer-mediated social interaction. While far from being the first such mechanism, blogrolls offered an opportunity for bloggers to provide a list of their peers; the present generation of social media environments similarly provide lists of friends and followers. Where blogrolls and other earlier lists may have been user-generated, the social media lists of today are more likely to have been produced by the platforms themselves, and are of intrinsic value to the platform providers at least as much as to the users themselves; both Facebook and Twitter have highlighted the importance of their respective “social graphs” (their databases of user connections) as fundamental elements of their fledgling business models. This represents what Mejias describes as “nodocentrism,” which “renders all human interaction in terms of network dynamics (not just any network, but a digital network with a profit-driven infrastructure).”The communicative content of social media spaces is also frequently rendered in the form of lists. Famously, blogs are defined in the first place by their reverse-chronological listing of posts (Walker Rettberg), but the same is true for current social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms are inherently centred around an infinite, constantly updated and extended list of posts made by individual users and their connections.The concept of the list implies a certain degree of order, and the orderliness of content lists as provided through the latest generation of centralised social media platforms has also led to the development of more comprehensive and powerful, commercial as well as scholarly, research approaches to the study of social media. Using the example of Twitter, this article discusses the challenges of such “big data” research as it draws on the content lists provided by proprietary social media platforms.Twitter Archives for ResearchTwitter is a particularly useful source of social media data: using the Twitter API (the Application Programming Interface, which provides structured access to communication data in standardised formats) it is possible, with a little effort and sufficient technical resources, for researchers to gather very large archives of public tweets concerned with a particular topic, theme or event. Essentially, the API delivers very long lists of hundreds, thousands, or millions of tweets, and metadata about those tweets; such data can then be sliced, diced and visualised in a wide range of ways, in order to understand the dynamics of social media communication. Such research is frequently oriented around pre-existing research questions, but is typically conducted at unprecedented scale. The projects of media and communication researchers such as Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, Wood and Baughman, or Lotan, et al.—to name just a handful of recent examples—rely fundamentally on Twitter datasets which now routinely comprise millions of tweets and associated metadata, collected according to a wide range of criteria. What is common to all such cases, however, is the need to make new methodological choices in the processing and analysis of such large datasets on mediated social interaction.Our own work is broadly concerned with understanding the role of social media in the contemporary media ecology, with a focus on the formation and dynamics of interest- and issues-based publics. We have mined and analysed large archives of Twitter data to understand contemporary crisis communication (Bruns et al), the role of social media in elections (Burgess and Bruns), and the nature of contemporary audience engagement with television entertainment and news media (Harrington, Highfield, and Bruns). Using a custom installation of the open source Twitter archiving tool yourTwapperkeeper, we capture and archive all the available tweets (and their associated metadata) containing a specified keyword (like “Olympics” or “dubstep”), name (Gillard, Bieber, Obama) or hashtag (#ausvotes, #royalwedding, #qldfloods). In their simplest form, such Twitter archives are commonly stored as delimited (e.g. comma- or tab-separated) text files, with each of the following values in a separate column: text: contents of the tweet itself, in 140 characters or less to_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet recipient (for @replies) from_user: screen name of the tweet sender id: numerical ID of the tweet itself from_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet sender iso_language_code: code (e.g. en, de, fr, ...) of the sender’s default language source: client software used to tweet (e.g. Web, Tweetdeck, ...) profile_image_url: URL of the tweet sender’s profile picture geo_type: format of the sender’s geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_0: first element of the geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_1: second element of the geographical coordinates created_at: tweet timestamp in human-readable format time: tweet timestamp as a numerical Unix timestampIn order to process the data, we typically run a number of our own scripts (written in the programming language Gawk) which manipulate or filter the records in various ways, and apply a series of temporal, qualitative and categorical metrics to the data, enabling us to discern patterns of activity over time, as well as to identify topics and themes, key actors, and the relations among them; in some circumstances we may also undertake further processes of filtering and close textual analysis of the content of the tweets. Network analysis (of the relationships among actors in a discussion; or among key themes) is undertaken using the open source application Gephi. While a detailed methodological discussion is beyond the scope of this article, further details and examples of our methods and tools for data analysis and visualisation, including copies of our Gawk scripts, are available on our comprehensive project website, Mapping Online Publics.In this article, we reflect on the technical, epistemological and political challenges of such uses of large-scale Twitter archives within media and communication studies research, positioning this work in the context of the phenomenon that Lev Manovich has called “big social data.” In doing so, we recognise that our empirical work on Twitter is concerned with a complex research site that is itself shaped by a complex range of human and non-human actors, within a dynamic, indeed volatile media ecology (Fuller), and using data collection and analysis methods that are in themselves deeply embedded in this ecology. “Big Social Data”As Manovich’s term implies, the Big Data paradigm has recently arrived in media, communication and cultural studies—significantly later than it did in the hard sciences, in more traditionally computational branches of social science, and perhaps even in the first wave of digital humanities research (which largely applied computational methods to pre-existing, historical “big data” corpora)—and this shift has been provoked in large part by the dramatic quantitative growth and apparently increased cultural importance of social media—hence, “big social data.” As Manovich puts it: For the first time, we can follow [the] imaginations, opinions, ideas, and feelings of hundreds of millions of people. We can see the images and the videos they create and comment on, monitor the conversations they are engaged in, read their blog posts and tweets, navigate their maps, listen to their track lists, and follow their trajectories in physical space. (Manovich 461) This moment has arrived in media, communication and cultural studies because of the increased scale of social media participation and the textual traces that this participation leaves behind—allowing researchers, equipped with digital tools and methods, to “study social and cultural processes and dynamics in new ways” (Manovich 461). However, and crucially for our purposes in this article, many of these scholarly possibilities would remain latent if it were not for the widespread availability of Open APIs for social software (including social media) platforms. APIs are technical specifications of how one software application should access another, thereby allowing the embedding or cross-publishing of social content across Websites (so that your tweets can appear in your Facebook timeline, for example), or allowing third-party developers to build additional applications on social media platforms (like the Twitter user ranking service Klout), while also allowing platform owners to impose de facto regulation on such third-party uses via the same code. While platform providers do not necessarily have scholarship in mind, the data access affordances of APIs are also available for research purposes. As Manovich notes, until very recently almost all truly “big data” approaches to social media research had been undertaken by computer scientists (464). But as part of a broader “computational turn” in the digital humanities (Berry), and because of the increased availability to non-specialists of data access and analysis tools, media, communication and cultural studies scholars are beginning to catch up. Many of the new, large-scale research projects examining the societal uses and impacts of social media—including our own—which have been initiated by various media, communication, and cultural studies research leaders around the world have begun their work by taking stock of, and often substantially extending through new development, the range of available tools and methods for data analysis. The research infrastructure developed by such projects, therefore, now reflects their own disciplinary backgrounds at least as much as it does the fundamental principles of computer science. In turn, such new and often experimental tools and methods necessarily also provoke new epistemological and methodological challenges. The Twitter API and Twitter ArchivesThe Open

Social media and on-line interaction can be as significant as the offline environment in shaping youth health behaviour, possibly explaining the association between social media and alcohol use by youth. Social media also presents opportunities for new prevention and intervention strategies. Social media are inherently social, and people are inevitably influenced by the interactions therein [5]. Ng Fat et al. propose that the association between heavier social media use and higher likelihood of more frequent drinking by youth could be due to cultural norms of drinking which are transferred through the on-line context [1, 6]. Prior research work on norms concerning addictive behaviours [7-9] provide support to this notion, suggesting that observed norms are a powerful transferer of health behaviours. The challenge of social media is that they are likely to distort the user's perception of reality due to user activity, contacts and various algorithms [10]. Perceptions of alcohol norms or the impression of how much others are drinking are often over-estimated [2, 11]. This poses a risk to young people who are particularly susceptible to social norms and can lead to many unwanted and harmful behaviour patterns, such as increased drinking. Ng Fat et al. did not investigate the effect of social norms as such, although they discussed youths' sociability both on- and off-line as a potential factor influencing greater alcohol use. However, their results highlight where the gaps exist in understanding how social media and on-line relationships could impact the behaviour of developing youths. Emerging research in the field suggests that social media and virtual interaction in general can be as powerful as the off-line environment in terms of shaping youth behaviour [12]. Ng Fat et al. defined social media use as belonging to social media sites, including Facebook, Myspace and Bebo. However, social media are much more diverse and manifold, warranting wider and more nuanced consideration. Research indicates that social media platforms differ greatly when it comes to interface and content [13]. Social media such as Facebook and Instagram are more user-orientated and on these types of platforms, users typically have a visible identity. Interaction in these services is based on people's mutual relationships and content is mainly shared among a certain set of other users (i.e. friends, followers) [13]. It is possible that, on platforms such as these, social interaction is more meaningful and social influence and behavioural diffusion occur more easily. Social media such as YouTube and Twitter are more content-orientated where networks are established around users’ shared interests. Other users or audiences are more far-reaching and often anonymous [14]. Young individuals are likely to turn towards more interactional social media platforms where communication is mutual [15, 16]. This could also partly explain the clearer pattern between social media use and higher likelihood of more frequent drinking among the 10–15 age group. It is noteworthy that Ng Fat et al. conclude that no direct evidence was found indicating that the rise of social media platforms could be contributing to the increase in non-drinking among youth [17]. While social media use has been associated with adverse health behaviours, the opportunities to employ different on-line platforms for prevention and intervention strategies are abundant. However, future longitudinal research is needed, as social media are rapidly expanding and evolving. New forms of social media may present unforeseeable risks for youth alcohol use and other off-line risk behaviours, but also opportunities for prevention. None.

The use and utilization of social media applications, tools, and services enables advanced services in daily routines, activities, and work environments. Nowadays, disconnection from social media services is a disadvantage due to their increasing use and functionality. The use of social media applications and services has provided different methods and routines for communications that ranges from posting, reposting, commenting, interacting, and live communication that can reach a mass population with minimum time, effort, and expenses compared with traditional media systems and channels. The current benefits of using social media can assist in providing better services in terms of communication and guidance for civil protection services within governmental sectors, as reported by different research studies. The use of social media has been found to be critically important by governmental agencies in different situations for directing, educating, and engaging people during different events. This study investigates the use of social media services in Saudi Arabia in governmental sectors to outline the opportunities and challenges faced, given the challenging situations faced annually during the Hajj and Ramadan rituals, and sporadic flood crisis events. This research focuses on defining the current stand and challenges of using social media services for providing mass communication and civil engagement during hazardous and challenging events in Saudi Arabia. The results of this study will be used as a roadmap for future investigation in this regard.

The chapter presents a qualitative study of considering Digital humanities (DH) as a domain that explores the intersection of humanities, digital/AI technology, all forms of media, and its impact on society at large. DH has expanded since the 1990s, focusing on fundamental research paradigms and methodologies in various academic domains. Additionally, it focuses on understanding social media, its changing forms, and its role in e-democratic expression and innovation. The chapter aims to develop arguments for how it is important to understand DH as an explorer of multiliteracies (constituted of knowledge-based skills to live in a digital society), and multimedia, a computer-based genre of communication that combines multiple media into an interactive whole. Without comprehensive adoption of multiliteracies and multimedia, Mark Bauerlein, an English Professor, suggests that digital illiteracy is increased due to technological advancements and that students should practice works without technology and return to “chalk and blackboard” methods. The chapter criticizes his proposal and provides a concept of “social media or education through digital humanities” as a solution to multiliteracies, by justifying that the future of combining digital humanities and social media is a postdigital media I called DH media (defined as the latest form of media), that demands reformulation of designing curricular, teaching, and learning practices. DH media facilitates multiliteracy pedagogy for multiple social media spaces, digital citizenship, digital society, and digital globalization. To evaluate how DH media facilitates learning about these issues, the chapter conceptualizes four phases of digital illiteracy: unlettered phase, unlearned phase, nescient phase, and nood phase; and discusses how Media (social/communication/creative, or art) needs Teaching Digital Humanities (TDH) for bridging the gap, divide, and chasm in teaching the non-engineering students to equip them with imperatives to navigate all the digital intersectionality of life. The chapter, hence, encourages researchers to explore DH as a new solution for all the phases of digital illiteracy prevalent in digital globalization and develop suitable users of contemporary social media.

BackgroundDespite the possible impacts of social media on oral health literacy, the specific challenges and opportunities in this particular setting remain underexplored. The current research objective was identify the opportunities and challenges of social media for oral health literacy based on Iranian dentists’ perspectives.MethodsIn the current qualitative investigation, a semi-structured interview was conducted with 24 dentists utilizing a purposive snowball sampling method. The analysis of the data was performed using thematic analysis in the MAXQDA 10 software.ResultsThe analysis of the interview data led to recognition of six main themes and a total of 16 sub-themes. The three main themes identified as opportunities for using social media for oral health literacy include facilitating accessibility, popularizing, and supporting usability. Three identified challenges for oral health literacy include quality issues, incomplete understandability, and create bias in usability for oral health information. Social media platforms present unique opportunities for enhancing information accessibility through increasing information encountering, interactive question-answering, and communication empowerment. Providing opportunities for simplifying information, promoting the prevention of oral health diseases, and clarifying information claims are social media facilitate roles that can effectively make information more understandable. Moreover, social media platforms facilitate the use of oral health information by supporting decision-making, dental counseling presentations, and experience sharing. Misinformation, the complexity of information quality evaluation and privacy, and ethical and security concerns are significant social media challenges for oral information accessibility. Insufficent published information and creating fear by reading health information (cyberchondria) are social media challenges that affect the understandability of information. Ignoring content disclaimers and misleading advertising are two challenges within social media that hinder the usability of oral health information.ConclusionSocial media acts as a dual-faceted method for oral health literacy, providing both opportunities and challenges. Confronting the obstacles associated with social media demands the creation of solutions that strengthen their positive attributes.

Poe in Cyberspace: Have Poe Websites Become an Endangered Species?

This paper sought to assess the challenges and prospects of social media for political mobilization in Ethiopia. In the study, a survey research method was used. Samples were selected based on a multistage sampling technique. So that stratified and simple random sampling techniques were applied. Data were collected from primary and secondary sources. The tools employed to collect primary data were interview and questionnaire. Primary data was gathered from 156 samples. Secondary data from books, reports, and Social Media Networks was used. The quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (like percentage and frequency) while the qualitative data collected through interview were used to triangulate the results of quantitative data. Findings from the study have shown that the main sources of political information are social media. It also revealed that Facebook is the most popular social media format followed by YouTube and Twitter. Regarding its role, social media has great importance for political mobilization. Social media users may discover political activities in social media and in this way intensify their political knowledge, increase their political efficacy, and improve their political participation. As the challenges of social media in Ethiopia, there are now quite some fake or sarcastic “news” sites that often post stories that sound authentic. Some fake news sites simply exist to post click bait stories or to troll readers who don’t do their own research. Some other challenges of social media identified by this study are limited connection speed, cost, and its inaccessibility to rural areas.

While the term “humanities” is not in itself a particularly contentious one among academics, the addition of the term “digital” creates all sorts of problems, even the superficially illogical contention that digital humanities are not humanities at all. The fundamental rupture between digital and print humanities lies in the turning of a materialist, object-oriented analysis upon the practices of humanistic scholarship. That is, in their newness, the digital humanities are unsurprisingly self-reflective about the materiality of their scholarly practices. This self-reflection has been largely absent from traditional humanities where we had all but naturalized the material composition of dissertations, journal articles, monographs, and so on. As a result, even as we continue to pursue traditional scholarly methods, it becomes increasingly difficult to do so without a self-reflective awareness of the historical-material contingency of these practices. In short, they are no longer the same. To explore this issue, this chapter takes up assemblage theory, and actor-network theory to investigate the intersection of mobile technologies and social media in the digital humanities including conference backchannels and networked research communities mediated through Twitter, Google Buzz, and similar applications. The chapter considers how, even for those who continue to publish in traditional genres on traditional subjects, the development of these digital assemblages are transforming compositional practices.

Millions of users share their experiences, thoughts, and interests online, through social media sites (e.g., Twitter, Flickr, YouTube). As a result, these sites host a substantial number of user-contributed documents (e.g., textual messages, photographs, videos) for a wide variety of events (e.g., concerts, political demonstrations, earthquakes). In this dissertation, we present techniques for leveraging the wealth of available social media documents to identify and characterize events of different types and scale. By automatically identifying and characterizing events and their associated user-contributed social media documents, we can ultimately offer substantial improvements in browsing and search quality for event content. To understand the types of events that exist in social media, we first characterize a large set of events using their associated social media documents. Specifically, we develop a taxonomy of events in social media, identify important dimensions along which they can be categorized, and determine the key distinguishing features that can be derived from their associated documents. We quantitatively examine the computed features for different categories of events, and establish that significant differences can be detected across categories. Importantly, we observe differences between events and other non-event content that exists in social media. We use these observations to inform our event identification techniques. To identify events in social media, we follow two possible scenarios. In one scenario, we do not have any information about the events that are re ected in the data. In this scenario, we use an online clustering framework to identify these unknown events and their associated social media documents. To distinguish between event and non-event content, we develop event classification techniques that rely on a rich family of aggregate cluster statistics, including temporal, social, topical, and platform-centric characteristics. In addition, to tailor the clustering framework to the social media domain, we develop similarity metric learning techniques for social media documents, exploiting the variety of document context features, both textual and non-textual. In our alternative event identification scenario, the events of interest are known, through user-contributed event aggregation platforms (e.g., Last.fm events, EventBrite, Facebook events). In this scenario, we can identify social media documents for the known events by exploiting known event features, such as the event title, venue, and time. While this event information is generally helpful and easy to collect, it is often noisy and ambiguous. To address this challenge, we develop query formulation strategies for retrieving event content on different social media sites. Specifically, we propose a two-step query formulation approach, with a first step that uses highly specific queries aimed at achieving high-precision results, and a second step that builds on these high-precision results, using term extraction and frequency analysis, with the goal of improving recall. Importantly, we demonstrate how event-related documents from one social media site can be used to enhance the identification of documents for the event on another social media site, thus contributing to the diversity of information that we identify. The number of social media documents that our techniques identify for each event is potentially large. To avoid overwhelming users with unmanageable volumes of event information, we design techniques for selecting a subset of documents from the total number of documents that we identify for each event. Specifically, we aim to select high-quality, relevant documents that re ect useful event information. For this content selection task, we experiment with several centrality-based techniques that consider the similarity of each event-related document to the central theme of its associated event and to other social media documents that correspond to the same event. We then evaluate both the relative and overall user satisfaction with the selected social media documents for each event. The existing tools to find and organize social media event content are extremely limited. This dissertation presents robust ways to organize and filter this noisy but powerful event information. With our event identification, characterization, and content selection techniques, we provide new opportunities for exploring and interacting with a diverse set of social media documents that re ect timely and revealing event content. Overall, the work presented in this dissertation provides an essential methodology for organizing social media documents that re ect event information, towards improved browsing and search for social media event data.

The good in social media.

ABSTRACTMajor developments in information technology in the digital society are eventually realised in the way in which research is conducted, particularly in the field of digital humanities (DH). Through a brief historical survey, this paper observes that the adoption of new technologies in DH occurs with some delay from the wide-scale adoption of the same technologies in other areas of society. This delay allows for a prediction about what technologies may be adopted in the near future in DH. In particular, the rise of social media in recent years provides a potential model for future DH research, particularly as it differs greatly from previous technologies in its capacity to engage end-users in digital methods. This paper argues that the techniques by which users interact with data in social media, particularly categorisation and semantic tagging, can be applied to a broad range of humanities research methodologies using similar interfaces to those of social media platforms. It then discusses some research tools developed by the author as a way of facilitating the interaction between researchers and primary sources using digital methods. Although much more limited than social media tools, it shows a way forward for implementing social media methods in the field of humanities research.

Introduction:American Quarterly in the Digital Sphere Lauren Tilton (bio), Amy E. Earhart (bio), Matthew Delmont (bio), Susan Garfinkel (bio), Jesse P. Karlsberg (bio), and Angel David Nieves (bio) This special issue explores digital humanities as a designation, as an associated constellation of technologies and practices, and as a site of convergence for inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary scholarship. Propelled by the ever-increasing power of computing and grounded in the ongoing development of a networked new media, digital humanities scholarship has coalesced around a shared set of values: that theory can be engaged through practice, that scholarship should be open and accessible to all, and that collaboration is pivotal in American studies. At the same time, American studies scholars in the digital humanities have reinvigorated the important work of investigating cultural and political formations, excavating power relations, and expanding scholarly inquiry to encompass the everyday as much as the exceptional. With this special issue, we seek to open a new phase of discussion by overtly exploring the connections between critically engaged forms of American studies and the digital humanities. As American studies scholars have long recognized, disappointment, anger, and agitation can be generative. Work on this special issue began in the spring of 2016, shortly after American Quarterly announced a new initiative to engage more actively with the digital humanities, publishing a section titled "Digital Projects Review." This new initiative was encouraging to the American Studies Association Digital Humanities Caucus (DH Caucus) and other scholars who work at the intersections of American studies and digital humanities. However, the initial manifestation of the "Digital Projects Review" struck many scholars as being out of step with the vibrant and innovative American studies approaches to digital humanities that have emerged over the past two decades.1 This frustration found an outlet on social media, and on the DH Caucus email list, which eventually led the six of us to propose this special issue, "Toward a Critically Engaged Digital Practice: American Studies and the Digital Humanities." The diversity of institutional affiliations, research perspectives, disciplinary backgrounds, and professional roles within our [End Page 361] group of coeditors has enabled a collaboration that, we hope, both reflects and advances the synergies of exciting new work emerging at the intersections of American studies and digital humanities, as highlighted in the following pages. While the spark that catalyzed this special issue was recent, the archives of American Quarterly show that the intertwined roots of American studies and digital humanities are deep. In June 1999 American Quarterly published an experimental online issue and concurrent print symposium combining "hypertext and American studies scholarship." The project, wrote Roy Rosenzweig in his editor's introduction, "tried to bring together something rather old-fashioned and established—the scholarly journal article—with something new and still emerging—the networked and digital space of the World Wide Web."2 Nearly two decades later, scholars are still wrestling with questions about the relationship between print and online scholarship, and are exploring the possibilities enabled by digital tools, methods, and platforms. Several of the essays in the September 2006 special issue, "Rewiring the 'Nation': The Place of Technology in American Studies," edited by Siva Vaidhyanathan, also speak to issues that are of interest to scholars who work in American studies and digital humanities. Nicole Fleetwood, for example, examines how different technological narratives (e.g., news media, meteorology, and governmental reports) during and after Hurricane Katrina rendered African American residents of New Orleans as disposable, focusing on technological failures and solutions rather than examining human catalysts and responses. "Technology here should be understood as a media process of production and as a discursive tool by which particular narratives are naturalized and certain bodies made vulnerable," Fleetwood argues. "In this context, Hurricane Katrina reveals a different kind of determinism—the stark operations of technology in determining who lives and who dies."3 More recently, Lauren Klein's review essay "American Studies after the Internet" (December 2012) and Lisa Nakamura's "Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture" (December 2014) both offer models for what a deeper engagement by American Quarterly with digital humanities might look like. Nakamura shows how labor by women of color has...

Practice Paper of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: Social Media and the Dietetics Practitioner: Opportunities, Challenges, and Best Practices