My final seminar paper is titled “Introducing TikTok to Digital Humanities Scholarship”. The following is my updated abstract: 

This paper explores TikTok’s transformative role in Digital Humanities, moving beyond its perception as just an entertainment platform to a valuable tool for community engagement and knowledge exchange. It analyzes TikTok’s impact on various aspects of Digital Humanities through several focused sections. The first part discusses digital community-building within the Mexican-American community, highlighting TikTok’s facilitation of authentic expression and challenge to traditional narratives. The next section examines knowledge validation and sourcing on TikTok, emphasizing its embrace of lived experiences that disrupt conventional academic hierarchies. The paper then explores TikTok’s influence on visual authenticity and knowledge transformation, showcasing its unique visual and interactive features. The final section evaluates TikTok as a medium for digital public scholarship, considering its effects on academic communication, community engagement, and knowledge dissemination. Overall, the paper positions TikTok as a significant scholarly subject within Digital Humanities, advocating for its inclusion in academic discourse to enrich and diversify the field.

I didn’t want this paper to be too similar to my other research projects I have going on in psychology that are also related to TikTok so I ended up doing more of a general exploration of how my experiences sharing knowledge on TikTok connect to digital humanities scholarship. There’s some terms that I used in my paper that I’m not sure I would keep using because they feel a bit strange to me like “democratizing” and “inclusivity” and “diversity” because I feel like they have become so common in neoliberal academic scholarship that typically takes on more of a reformative approach to reshaping education as opposed to completely dismantling its oppressive structures. I prefer to use more abolitionist language, but I also wanted to use the language that was similar to the course readings so that’s why I used them. 

I feel like I struggled with coming up with a structure for this paper but once I started to just write down all of the connections I saw it was actually a really enjoyable paper to write. I also think that maybe engaging with and creating more theoretical work in DH just isn’t for me which I as surprised about. I’m usually a big fan of writing and reading theoretical work in critical-social psychology and get less excited reading empirical papers/research that describes more hands-on projects but with DH I feel like it’s the opposite. I think I just need to accept that the ideal balance for me as a researcher as I continue in my PhD program will be analyzing digital empirical data and using psychology scholarship to theoretically make sense of it. 

Hope y’all enjoy your break!

I was revisiting a lot of the readings from the social media week while writing my final paper. I realized that there’s a few that weren’t that relevant to my final project paper but are highly relevant to my other research projects so I thought I would share them with y’all. 

I’m currently drafting a research proposal for a study that aims to explore the significance of social media’s role in shaping the language and identity of Mexican-Americans.  I think Deuze and colleagues (2012) work will be really helpful in getting scholar who aren’t as familiar with social media in my field to understand the significance of my project. They suggest that media devices and consumption have become foundational features of our everyday lives, and that we need to better understand and navigate our increasingly media-saturated world. Additionally, the they argue that we no longer live with media, but in media and propose a “media life perspective” that starts from the realization that the whole of the world and our lived experience in it are framed by, mitigated through, and made immediate by media. This is something that is really key for me in using the digital landscape as a site for psychology research. 

In developing a methodological framework for creating interview questions for my study, I’m thinking of drawing on Taylor’s (2012) exploration of the unique rhetorical traditions within African American communities and the use of advanced data analysis techniques in studying language and communication patterns. Taylor argues that language and signifying are powerful tools of relationship and relational belonging in the African American community, and that the grammar of Blackness requires invention and reinvention through language to survive oppression and government violence. Additionally, Parham (2019) further argues that understanding the digital as both descriptive and generative of African American experiences of memory, space, and time resets the chronology for what we typically postulate as the technical device emergence of “the digital.” By integrating these perspectives into the research design, my study can shed light on how social media contributes to the evolution of relationships with identities and labels within the larger context of how Mexican-Americans navigate and resist the ongoing colonial violence. My hope is that insights gained from this study can contribute to a better understanding of the psychological and phenomenological aspects of social media use within the Mexican-American community, specifically in the context  of processes of decolonizing and re-indigenization.

Two out of the three workshops I attended this semester were the “Intro To Python” two-part series hosted by GC Digital Initiatives. As someone whose only coding experience was a 10-week long Intro to Python course that I took as an undergraduate about 4 years ago, I thought this was a great way to refresh my understanding of Python code. I think now that I have access to AI tools like ChatGPT that can write pieces of code for me, I’m more interested in just being able to read and understand the code as opposed to mastering the art of writing it myself completely. This workshop definitely helped me with that since I had forgotten a lot of the basics in these 4 years. I also hear often that Python is the easiest to understand programming language and/or the easiest to learn so I’m glad that this is the resource made available to students at the GC who want to learn how to get started with coding. I’m still learning about all of the things that I can build using Python code / what uses it can have in my life. I think that’s something that wasn’t necessarily covered in these two workshops but it would be nice to see a more intermediate workshop on that in the future, or even one that specifically shows us how to use AI to write code for us.

For example, I recently have been using ChatGPT to start building something that can help me practice and continue learning P’urhépecha, my ancestral Indigenous Mexican language. It’s a language that isn’t available on any of the popular online language learning programs / apps and all that students like myself really have to work with is lists of words with their Spanish translations that we can find online or obtain from P’urhepecha community members who teach the language. I’ve mostly been relying on making Quizlet flashcards from these lists of words but it can be very time consuming, even with the new AI feature that can turn digital notes into flashcards. I started using ChatGPT to write Python code that will allow me to skip a lot of the tedious work of gathering all of the information I have about different P’urhepecha words into a usable spreadsheet that I can later use to code different types interactive features such as flashcards, quizzes, and learning games. I liked the “Learn” feature on Quizlet that already has similar features to what I’m looking for but I didn’t like the actual making of the flashcard sets and the way those flashcards hold information is limited to a “front” and “back” (two variables) when I could use a lot more variables to make a more dynamic quizzing features and more effective learning process. If anyone knows of any resources that can help me continue this project please let me know, thanks!

When I was doing the modules to get started with Wikepedia editing I had noticed the presence of what Kwok (2020) refers to as the “neutrality problem”. I immediately thought to myself that one of the Five Pillars of Wikepedia isn’t really possible since all writing is shaped by political context, something that a lot of different education spaces still need to work on understanding. I’m glad that there’s a growing number of scholars in different fields who are willing to take on this epistemological interrogation of how much of Western academic principles are designed to center some ways of thinking over others, often making objectivity and impartiality more of a myth than a practice. This was my first time creating a Wikepedia account and making an edit to a page. I felt similar emotions to those described by Mari (2020) in the “When Wikepedia Fought Back” article in that I was also surprised to see just how “alive” Wikipedia is. This assignment and the readings helped me learn a lot about the social and political dynamics of how Wikipedia pages operate. Though I’m disappointed (but not surprised) to see that Wikepedia still doesn’t consider “blog posts” and similar materials to be “verifiable” materials appropriate for using as citations/references since not everyone with important knowledge to share with the world can access academic publishing and sometimes social media is the best option for finding documentation of different things. 

For the assignment I ended up editing Wikipedia page of the late Chicana feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldua. She’s one of those scholars that despite having a lot of really great ideas and profound impact on her communities, also said some really problematic things in her papers along the way. I noticed that a lot of my gender/women’s studies professors often had no clue about some of the critiques that Anzaldua’s work has been receiving the last decade until I brought it up in class. I think it’s one of those things where people’s critiques were getting suppressed for a long time and now as more Black and Indigenous Latino scholars manage to successfully carve out space in Latino academic spaces designed to exclude us there’s finally more academic sources critiquing Anzaldua’s work that professors can assign in their courses if they want to continue teaching Anzaldua’s work. I added the highlighted sentence with a citation to the brief “Criticism” section on her Wikepedia page.

I’m not very experienced with coding / programming / quantitative data analysis and I’ve been working with mostly qualitative data and so I was looking into what my options are for beginner-friendly data visualization that apply to qualitative data. I saw in Tooling Up For Digital Humanities: Data Visualization that word clouds might be a good fit for a data set I’ve been working with given the stage I’m currently at in analyzing that data. I tried making a word cloud in python but I haven’t tried coding in python in years and I couldn’t successful install the package that was needed for it to work. I was using a notebook in my Anaconda cloud account to avoid having to download the Anaconda navigator onto my computer but I might try it again after I install it. But honestly there’s a lot of word cloud generator tools out there that seem pretty simple to use so it might not be worth my time trying to create one in python. I was able to easily copy and paste my data into the generator on https://www.freewordcloudgenerator.com and it gave me this. I feel like it cut off some of the words though and I’m not sure how to fix that so I might try another generator. 

I also tried analyzing the same data set (they’re TikTok comments) on Palladio. I couldn’t do much since it seems to be a tool designed for quantitative data visualization or at least I couldn’t access some of the features that I might be able to use later once I have the results of my qualitative data analyses but I was able to just use the one quantitative variable (number of likes each comment got) to create something in it.  I liked how it lets me visualize all of the comments in one place and move them around and set the node sizes to be bigger for the comments that got the most likes. 

I think once I finish some of the qualitative coding I plan on doing on these TikTok comments I can see data visualization tools being really helpful for helping me see the patterns in the data, since “the goal of information visualization is to discover the structure of a (typically large) data set. This structure is not known a priori; a visualization is successful if it reveals this structure” (Manovich, 2010). I’m also really interested in how data visualization tools can help me with the task of demonstrating  how epistemological violence shows up in these comments. A Review of “Two Plantations” mentions how the discussed data visualization project, “produces a conversation within the site or among users visiting about who and what is missing… It is both what is present in the history and what is not that resonates with users”. I also need to figure out how to show what isn’t there, how to provide the necessary historical context to show the gaps in the discourse I am analyzing and showing the systemic reasons why the “more reliable sources” people kept asking to provide them in these comments don’t exist.  

I have a lot to say about the Difficult Heritage piece out of this week’s readings on Data and Visualization so I’m just going to focus on that one. 

I’m taking another class on archival research practices at the moment and just the other day I was telling my professor about how making knowledge publicly accessible comes with it’s own set of issues and I didn’t have the words to explain it until I read this paper. I had started to notice how public access makes it so that an individual can bypass having to have ties to a specific community in order to access the information and knowledge of the community that has been preserved. This article really highlights how Indigenous communities are susceptible to experiencing harm when researchers outside of their communities gain access to their data, culture, and knowledges. 

I also really appreciated the point about how, “a more systemic approach to the traditional knowledge labels employed by Mukurtu [allows] for individual items and collections to be withheld from view not just to members of the public but also to members of the originating community who might not be of the appropriate clan, stature, gender, or position.” To me this point also applies to Indigenous scholars since even those of us within Indigenous communities need to be careful not to overstep by taking on projects that are not our place to take on due to our positionality within the community. I also found the discussion about “the heritage effect” / “the museum effect” to be very useful to the development of one of my current research projects since I will be talking about how this effect shows up in the Mexican-American community (e.g. people knowing they have indigenous ancestry yet distance themselves from the current reality indigenous peoples in Mexico and speak of indigenous people as if they only exist in the past).

Additionally, the discussion in this article about how, “a researcher might need to navigate permissions for use of the data by the institutions holding the material, family or clan members with an interest in the materials, the tribal cultural heritage officer charged with preserving the tribe’s history, as well as the tribe’s governing authority,” made me think about the upcoming film Killers of the Flower Moon (directed by Martin Scorsese starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone). The film tells a story that takes place on the Osage Nation’s territory and the director actually (allegedly) did a great job of working with the Osage community to get the film to be something that many members of this indigenous community approve of. The director (in my opinion based on what I know about the film-making process) exemplified an approach that Indigenous scholars have been asking of non-Indigenous people to show when doing research or any kind of the work that requires gaining access to and telling Indigenous stories (I recommend checking out this Twitter thread by the former chief of the Osage nation sharing his experience with the film-making process if you’re interested, you’ll probably have to log in to Twitter to access the full thread though).

The Zapotec community is one of the 68 indigenous ethnic groups of Mexico and the preservation of the Zapotec language and ancestral knowledge of the community has been challenged by colonial forces for hundreds of years. One of the issues that has impacted Indigenous communities of Mexico has been the refusal to place Indigenous persons in positions of power to guide projects that are meant to help their own communities, such as academic anthropological projects focusing on the preservation of a community’s ancestral knowledge. Project Ticha, “a postcustodial digital archives project, in which a corpus of [Colonial Zapotec texts] is created by digitizing manuscripts in multiple archives and collections” is changing this pattern.

Project Ticha has been a project involving working alongside Zapotec community members to make these colonial Zapotec texts more accessible to the Zapotec community in a way that is “filling in the enormous gap in Zapotec documentation that has left linguistic research about this indigenous language in the hands of a few dedicated experts”. Additionally, the digital tool is “freely available to the public and is committed to remaining so”. This is embodying a key theme discussed in this week’s reading by and for Digital Humanities scholars about the meaning of DH. Ticha is a tool that was created by DH scholars in order to help support a pre-existing larger project of a marginalized community, in this case the project is Zapotec language and ancestral knowledge preservation.

If DH scholars are trying to avoid the neoliberal pattern of using scholarship / research to identify and document the problems of a marginalized without centering how that community wished to be supported through DH projects / resources, this is a great example of working with a community to provide appropriate tools / resources that the community can continue to use to further their own resistance against forms of systemic oppression. Instead of trying to provide a voice for the voiceless, a very colonial way of viewing the voices of indigenous communities, this project instead works with an Indigenous community to designs a mic that can be used to give voice to the community.