Flash Fellowship Project

The DWRL Flash Fellowship project funds graduate student staff members’ independent research projects in digital scholarship. First, we submitted project proposals that summarized our scholarly objectives for the project, our planned methodology and required resources, the rationale behind why we selected specific methodologies and tools, and our tentative plan for how we expected to accomplish our scholarly objectives in a specific time frame. This was my project proposal. The aim was to ultimately present our findings at the end of the academic school year at the annual DWRL showcase.

My project was to archive every single article in The New York Times containing the word “bot.” IThe aim of the project was to trace the discursive evolution of the word in popular news coverage by doing both a quantitative (empirically measurable) documentation of the terms popularity and publication context (date of publication, column, etc. and how often the term appeared in these contexts) as well as a qualitative analysis (definition of term, accompanying context including metadata patterns, etc.) I used the text-mining software Overviewdocs to archive and visualize patterns in the usage of “bat” over the course of the 200+ articles primarily in the last half of the 20th century. This project rose from my Master’s thesis on the rhetorical framing of bots as political agents in news coverage during the 2016 U.S. election cycle. Particularly, I was interested in exploring points in the term’s evolutionary trajectory from a “purely” technical term into a political topic.

The (unannounced) deletion of Overviewdocs at some point post-2021 and my computer changes since that research project erased my original, comprehensive database. However, I still have the notes, presentation PowerPoints, and numerous screenshots and videos recording my methods to verify the project’s existence. The videos were initially drafted in service of a potential DWRL lesson plan (see above), before I decided that the preparatory work necessary for this “lesson” required advanced legwork that was beyond practical application in the classroom for a general in-class activity.

Given the deletion of Overviewdocs, I see no purpose in completing and uploading the lesson plans — though I do plan on continuing to teach on digital archiving methods and textual analysis in the future.