Goals: Connecting Communications, Digital Humanities, and RedditMap.Social
Goal 1: Publish, provide access to, and share cultural data
One key goal within the field of communications — particularly in the study of online platforms like Reddit — is to understand how digital spaces shape public discourse and community formation. Communications scholars aim to analyze how users cluster into subcommunities, how topics emerge and spread, and how different groups engage with content across platforms. This goal aligns closely with a core goal of Digital Humanities (DH): to publish, provide access to, and share cultural data with both researchers and the public. The project RedditMap.Social serves as a powerful example of this alignment. By using clustering methods to map Reddit communities visually, it creates an open, accessible representation of the platform’s cultural landscape, allowing users to explore how conversations are organized and how different interest groups interact.
Goal 2: Preserve and protect cultural data
Another key goal in communications, especially within the study of digital journalism, is to understand how information flows between media outlets and how news organizations link to external sources to build credibility, provide context, or shape narratives. This goal connects directly to a core goal of Digital Humanities (DH): to preserve and protect cultural data. The project Capturing News Hyperlinking Practices at Scale aligns with this DH goal by creating a global, large-scale dataset that captures and archives how media outlets across different countries and regions use hyperlinks in their reporting. By systematically collecting this data using Media Cloud, the project ensures that hyperlinking practices — which are part of the evolving digital news ecosystem — are documented and preserved for future analysis. In doing so, this project does more than just analyze patterns; it safeguards a record of how digital journalism practices evolve over time, preserving this piece of cultural and communicative history for researchers in both communications and digital humanities.