This post answers questions posed to students in a blog post by Professor Hemphill,.

1. Which research methods do you most want to learn?

The research methods I’ve learned and practiced as a psychology student focus on phenomena that occur on the individual-person level. While useful for gaining insights about psychology, I’ve learned the hard way that these methods are less-applicable to digital humanities research. In a recent effort to study online-harassment, my collaborators and I began with an approach that examined harassment within individual tweets. This proved to be both difficult and ineffective. This has led me to believe that studying online-harassment at the conversation level or even the system level would be more effective. So, to this end, I’m interesting in learning methods that will allow for studying phenomena like online-harassment at levels that are somewhat removed from the individual-tweet. Specifically, I think that distance reading, looking at macro-level trends, and text-analysis, and visualization might be useful methods for a project like this.

Generally, I’m increasingly interested in data-mining and I think thick mapping is incredibly cool.

2. What topics in digital humanities research interest you?

Most of them. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I’m interested in human-computer interaction (broadly), information retrieval, natural-language processing, and ubiquitous computing (again, boradly).

3. Which digital literacies do you most want to master?

Distributed cognition definitely tops this list. I’m very interested in the notion that knowledge doesn’t only exist within our own minds, but is also embedded within the objects, environments, and various contexts in which we find ourselves. And while I believe that distributed cognition typically refers to the knowledge that passively exists within artifacts/places/things outside of ourselves (I could be wrong about this), I’m also really interested in the intentional offloading of cognitive processes to external artifacts to ease one’s cognitive burden and/or to enhance one’s cognitive capacities (this might fall more within the realm of transhumanism than within that of digital humanities, though).