JB Brentlinger – My project plans to study “live streaming,” a technology popular in video game culture, to understand its academic potential for the field of rhetorical studies. Specifically, with this research, I want to articulate a rationale for broadcasting important events (such as speaker series, games jams, and the like) on Twitch.tv as a form of publicity, production, and archival.
Ansley Colclough – My project critically examines the rhetorical construction of “Twitter” and “bots” as nonhuman political actors in mainstream political news coverage. Using a combination of text mining and visualization digital tools, I will analyze a set of articles on the topic of bots and politics from mainstream news sources (The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Yorker) to examine the frequency and context of specific metaphors or words used to describe bots.
KJ Schaeffner – For my project, I’m interested in attending to the history of popular music charts. In attempt to understand the music industry’s creation and maintenance of genres, I’ll be studying how the charts have changed over time: examining, particularly, how they have changed in sync with the particular musical objects that they attempt to chart. Ultimately, I aim to produce an infographic that maps the history of charting.
Amy Tuttle – Following the work of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project, my project will examine how propaganda bots are being used to amplify political communication over social media. I will use the programming language R to search the Twitter API for tweets that contain politically charged hashtags. By analyzing the data I collect, I will be able to 1) parse out the amount of Twitter content related to a particular political event and 2) investigate how much of this content was generated by highly automated accounts.
