Slides for a presentation given on July 29th 2009 at the 1st European Summer School "Culture & Technology" in Leipzig.

1. Digital Humanities and Internet
Research: shared methods and
perspectives
Dr. des. Cornelius Puschmann
Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf
cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de
European Summer School "Culture & Technology"
University of Leipzig
29 July 2009

2. This is not a project presentation
…but a (subjective) overview of two emerging fields and their relation

3. 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

4. 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?

5. Internet Research and Internet Studies
Internet Research Internet Studies
“Internet research is the “Internet studies is a field of academia
practice of using the Internet, dealing with the interaction between
especially the World Wide the Internet and modern society, and
Web, for research.” the sociological and technological
implications on one another.”
→ doing (academic) → doing research about the Internet
research via the Internet

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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)

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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!

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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)

15. Interactive concordance of Barak Obama's
inauguration speech

16. Visualization of token frequency in Marriot
on the Move blog

17. Word frequencies in different registers

18. 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

19. Thanks for listening!

20. Digital Humanities and Internet
Research: shared methods and
perspectives
Dr. des. Cornelius Puschmann
Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf
cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de
European Summer School "Culture & Technology"
University of Leipzig
29 July 2009