Values: Connecting Communications, Digital Humanities, and Project Values
Value 1: RedditMap.Social embodies several key values that align with both communications research and digital humanities (DH) principles. Collaboration is central to the project, as it brings together data scientists, communication scholars, and digital humanities researchers to design and implement a visual, interactive tool that maps online communities. This collaborative approach reflects DH’s interdisciplinary nature, where diverse teams combine technical, analytical, and cultural expertise to understand digital culture. Experimentation also drives the project, as it tests new ways of representing Reddit’s cultural and social dynamics using clustering algorithms and visual network mapping, helping scholars and the public better understand how online communities evolve and overlap. The value of openness is demonstrated through the project’s publicly accessible platform, which allows users to freely explore Reddit’s ecosystem, aligning with DH’s focus on making cultural data open to all. Transparency is equally important, as the project clearly documents how clusters are formed and how data is processed, ensuring users can understand the methodology behind the visualization.
Value 2: Capturing News Hyperlinking Practices at Scale similarly embraces values that align with both communications and digital humanities. Collaboration plays a foundational role, as the project depends on partnerships between communication researchers, computational scientists, and digital platforms like Media Cloud, allowing the project to track hyperlinking practices across global news ecosystems. This collaborative spirit reflects DH’s emphasis on bringing together diverse fields to study digital culture at scale. Experimentation is evident in the project’s use of computational methods to explore how hyperlinks function within digital journalism, applying new data-driven techniques to a traditional area of media research, which mirrors DH’s interest in testing new tools to analyze culture. The project also prioritizes openness, as it relies on open-source data from Media Cloud and shares its findings publicly, aligning with DH’s mission to make research and cultural data accessible to both scholars and the public.
