params.json

{"name":"Discursive-infrastructure","tagline":"A landing page for @mcburton's dissertation project analyzing digital humanities blogs as infrastructure for scholarly communication","body":"# Digital Humanities Blogs as Infrastructure for Scholarly Communication\r\n\r\nThis is the home on the web for [@mcburton's](http://twitter.com/mcburton) dissertation project. \r\n\r\n## What is this project?\r\n\r\nScholarly communication is in the midst of a sociotechnical reconfiguration. Scholarly publishing is in crisis. The scholarly monograph, the canonical unity of scholarship in the humanities, is allegedly in peril. We are entering a new age of [digital scholarship] and a concomitant infrastructure is rapidly evolving to fill new niches afforded by new communications technologies. New approaches to measuring impact, like [altmetrics], leverage the afforded traceability of social media and online behavior. Scholars have turned to social media, such as [blogs and Twitter](http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.4745), as an important means of interaction. Social media has flipped the flow of scholarly communication from one of scarcity to surfeit; it is impossible to keep up with the flood of blogs and tweets, yet, scholars in certain disciplines ignore these platforms at their peril. In the face of such information overload, scholarly communities must change not only their means of knowledge production, but their information seeking behavior and the ways in which membership and identity are constituted as well.\r\n\r\nOne emerging scholarly community, the digital humanities, has enthusiastically embraced social media as a means for informal scholarly communication. The importance of blogs in the digital humanities is evident in initiatives such as [Digital Humanities Now](http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/) and the [Journal of Digital Humanities](journalofdigitalhumanities.org). These two projects treat blogs as forms of proto-scholarship providing filter and review functions to the DH community; finding high quality discourse within a [curated “compendium” of scholarly blogs and aggregating selections into a formally peer-reviewed journal](http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/about/).\r\n\r\nClearly, within the mutually constitutive relationship between digital humanities scholars and the web there emerges interesting and not-well-understood configurations of knowledge practice. My research investigates these practices from the perspective of sociotechnical infrastructure for scholarly communication. How are the digital humanities using blogs? What kinds of discursive practices occur in these spaces? How can we understand this phenomena through the lens of [infrastructure]? My work makes contributions to our ability to understand critical sociotechnical systems by studying digital humanities blogs and through innovations in methodological inquiry. I am taking advantage of new techniques in text mining and machine learning to discover and explore themes within my corpus of digital humanities blogs. Topic modeling algorithms like [Latent Dirichlet Allocation] provide a means for [distantly reading] texts. However, the models produced by such algorithms still require theoretically grounded methods to understand and interpret. My research method combines topic modeling with [Grounded Theory] as a means for investigating large-scale, distributed sociotechnical infrastructure. LDA provides a means of clustering individual blog posts by mixtures of “topics” or co-occurrences of words. I then analyze the thematic clusters generated by the model through information visualization and qualitative coding and memoing.\r\n \r\n* [altmetrics] Priem, Jason et al. \"Altmetrics: a manifesto.\" (2010). <http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/>\r\n* [digital scholarship] Borgman, Christine L. Scholarship in the digital age: Information, infrastructure, and the Internet. MIT press, 2007.\r\n* [infrastructure] Star, Susan Leigh. \"The ethnography of infrastructure.\" American behavioral scientist 43.3 (1999): 377-391.\r\n* [Grounded Theory] Glaser, Barney G, and Anselm L Strauss. The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Aldine de Gruyter, 1967.\r\n* [Latent Dirichlet Allocation] Blei, David M, Andrew Y Ng, and Michael I Jordan. \"Latent dirichlet allocation.\" the Journal of machine Learning research 3 (2003): 993-1022.\r\n* [distantly reading] Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract models for a literary history. Verso Books, 2005.\r\n\r\n## Who am I?\r\n\r\nI am a doctoral candidate at the [University of Michigan School of Information](http://si.umich.edu). My research interests include a healthy blend of infrastructure studies, scholarly communication, and digital humanities. His dissertation chair is [Paul Conway](http://www.si.umich.edu/people/paul-conway).","google":"","note":"Don't delete this file! It's used internally to help with page regeneration."}