Scope

internetI study professional and amateur social media writing, online comments, and big-data sets related to online writing. Because I am interested in the historical antecedents of online comments, I am also familiar with the history of writing, including Sumerian writing (cuneiform tablets), ancient non-Greek rhetoric, Plato’s corpus, print culture scholarship, and visual rhetoric.

Cuneiform Tablet

In order to increase the effectiveness of my research, I perform qualitative research, including individual/group interviews and surveys, as well as analytical statistical measurements using text-crawling computer software (programs using the computer language Python).

 

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign