How do the recommended videos look like on their YouTube? Theirtube is a YouTube filter bubble simulator that provides a look into how videos are recommended on other people’s YouTube. Users can experience how the YouTube home page would look for six different personas. Each persona simulates the viewing environment of real YouTube users who […]
The brutal killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis this summer marked a key event in the history of violence against Black Americans. But it was just one of many acts of violence that have been committed in American history. In order to put Floyd’s killing into a larger historical context, our Digital History […]
Post Content Over the past few years I’ve become interested in better understanding how my own discipline works. As someone whose work has changed considerably over the past decade, it’s probably a predictable response. In one sense, it is about asking, How do I fit in? Read full post here.
My book club was reading The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss. In the middle of an otherwise unremarkable plot, we found a 35-page interlude about a highly attractive fairy, describing her body in minute, eye-rolling detail. After slogging through that book, I began paying attention to similarly stereotyped descriptions of bodies in other books. […]
We live in communities that are increasingly becoming intersected and globalized. There is a lot of mixing in terms of race, religion, ideologies, languages, ethnicity, and many other aspects. The development of such an intersection has historically been traced from systems of migration and capitalist expansion (1). In many discussions of world development, Africa is excluded yet major forms of migration and population […]
The Not Even Past Conversations Series was born out of the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. It takes the form of a long interview held informally (usually at home) over Zoom with leading scholars and teachers at the University of Texas at Austin and beyond. The first in the series is a conversation with […]
.entry-header This blog post is loosely connected to a talk I’m giving (virtually) at the Workshop on Narrative Understanding, Storylines, and Events at the ACL. It’s an informal talk, exploring some of the challenges and opportunities we encounter when we take the impressive sentence-level tools of contemporary NLP and try to use them to produce […]
More and more academics have turned to digital humanities to interrogate early modern history, which has led to an influx of 3D modeling projects of early urban spaces. Serena Zabin’s video game, Witness to the Revolution, is one great example. Set in 1770 Boston right after the Boston Massacre, the game investigates many historical questions […]
My latest paper, “Situated data analysis: a new method for analysing encoded power relationships in social media“, started out as an analysis of the data visualisations in Strava, but ended up as something more ambitious: a method that I think can be used to analyse all kinds of digital platform using personal data in different […]
In the 1970s, Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs to combat, what he called, public enemy number one. In New York City, groups like the Black Panther Party and Young Lords recognized the damage addiction was doing to local communities, but also felt that federal efforts to combat drug use were doing more damage. […]
