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ABSTRACT
“Big data” is neither unified nor stable, but instead offers opportunities for further exploration of queer methods. Communication studies scholars are particularly well suited to engage in this developing area. The potentials are illustrated in this article's description of an in-progress collaborative research project using artificial intelligence to examine public engagement with campus monuments and memorials at a large southeastern university. This discussion of an in-progress big-data research project, a collaboration between scholars of communication, public history/digital humanities, and geography, exemplifies the alignment of communication studies and emerging discussions in queer methods to a degree that we argue communication studies already is and has long been a queer project.
Authors’ notes
This research was approved by Clemson University's Campus Institutional Review Board (Protocol Exempt Determination for IRB2019-429).
Notes
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7 Heather Love, “How the Other Half Thinks.” In Imagining Queer Methods, ed. Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim (New York University Press, 2019), 28–42, 29. For overviews of queer theory, see William B. Turner, A Genealogy of Queer Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); Lorenzo Bernini, Michela Baldo, and Elena Basile, Queer Theories: An Introduction: From Mario Mieli to the Antisocial Turn (New York: Routledge, 2020), Hannah McCann and Whitney Monaghan, Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).
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9 Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim, eds., Imagining Queer Methods (New York University Press: 2019).
10 John Law, After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (New York: Routledge, 2004).
11 George E. Marcus, “Ethnography Two Decades after Writing Culture: From the Experimental to the Baroque,” Anthropological Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2007): 1127–45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30052775.
12 Amir Gandomi and Murtaza Haider, “Beyond the Hype: Big Data Concepts, Methods, and Analytics,” International Journal of Information Management 35, no. 2 (2015): 137–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2014.10.007.
13 Pablo Cabrera-Álvarez, “Survey Research in Times of Big Data,” Empiria: Revista de Metodología de Ciencias Sociales, no. 53 (2022): 31–51. http://DOI.empiria.53.2022.32611.
14 Malcolm R. Parks, “Big Data in Communication Research: Its Contents and Discontents,” Journal of Communication 64, no. 2 (2014): 355–60; Kate Crawford, Mary L. Gray, and Kate Miltner, “Critiquing Big Data: Politics, Ethics, Epistemology,” International Journal of Communication 8, no. 10 (2014): 1663–72. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/download/2167/1164.
15 E.g., Maria I. Espinoza and Melissa Aronczyk, “Big Data for Climate Action or Climate Action for Big Data?” Big Data and Society 8, no. 1 (2021): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720982032; Gastón Becerra, “The Promise and the Premise: How Digital Media Present Big Data,” First Monday 26, no. 9 (2021). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v26i9.10539.
16 Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan, Scott B. Weingart, and Kim Martin, Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope (2016). World Scientific, 3, emphasis original.
17 Lev Manovich, “Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data,” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2, no. 1 (2011): 460–75, 2.
18 Roopika Risam, “Digital Humanities.” In Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data, eds. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Daniela Agostinho, Annie Ring, Catherine D’Ignazio and Kristin Veel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 161–68.
19 Koraljka Golub, Ahmad M. Kamal, and Johan Vekselius, “Knowledge Organization for Digital Humanities: An Introduction.” In Information and Knowledge Organization in Digital Humanities, eds. Koraljka Golub and Ying-Hsang (New York: Routledge, 2021), 1–22.
20 Patrik Svensson, “Beyond the Big Tent.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2012), 36–49, 49.
21 Ibid., see also Rob Kitchin, “Big Data, New Epistemologies, and Paradigm Shifts,” Big Data and Society 1, no. 1 (2014): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951714528481; Alan Liu, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities,” pmla 128, no. 2 (2013): 409–23; Fangli Su, Yin Zhang, and Zachary Immel, “Digital Humanities Research: Interdisciplinary Collaborations, Themes and Implications to Library and Information Science,” Journal of Documentation 77, no. 1 (2020): 143–61. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2020-0072.
22 Quoted in Dagmar Monett, Colin W. Lewis, and Kristinn R. Thórisson, “Introduction to the JAGI Special Issue ‘On Defining Artificial Intelligence,’” Journal of Artificial General Intelligence 11, no. 2 (2020): 1–100, 1. https://doi.org/10.2478/jagi-2020-0003.
23 “About.” n.d. Journal of Cultural Analytics. https://culturalanalytics.org/about, paragraph 2.
24 Joseph Aoun, Robot-proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).
25 Erik Hermann, “Artificial Intelligence and Mass Personalization of Communication Content—An Ethical and Literacy Perspective,” New Media & Society 24, no. 5 (2021): 1258–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211022702.
26 Chad Edwards, Autumn Edwards, Patric Spence, and Xialing Lin, “I, Teacher: Using Artificial Intelligence and Social Robots in Communication and Instruction,” Communication Education 6, no. 74 (2018): 473–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2018.1502459.
27 Jordana Cox and Lauren Tilton, “The Digital Public Humanities: Giving New Arguments and New Ways to Argue,” Review of Communication 19, no. 2 (2019): 127–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2019.1598569.
28 Ghaziani and Brim, Imagining Queer Methods; Karen Browne and Carole J. Nash, “Queer Methods and Methodologies: An Introduction.” In Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer theories and Social Science Research, eds. Karen Browne and Carole J. Nash (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010), 1–24; D’Lane R. Compton, Tey Meadow, and Kristen. Schilt, eds., Other, Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).
29 Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
30 Browne and Nash, “Queer Methods and Methodologies.”
31 Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
32 Amin Makkawy and Shane T. Moreman, “Putting Crip in the Script: A Critical Communication Pedagogical Study of Communication Theory Textbooks,” Communication Education 68, no. 4 (2019): 401–16; Gus A. Yep, “Queering/quaring/kauering/crippin’/transing ‘Other Bodies’ in Intercultural Communication.” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 6, no. 2 (2013): 118–26.
33 Ghaziani and Brim, Imagining Queer Methods.
34 See Ben Marwick, Carl Boettiger, and Lincoln Mullen, “Packaging Data Analytical Work Reproducibly using R and Friends,” The American Statistician 72, no. 1 (2018): 80–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2017.1375986. However, scholars of LGBTQ+ persons, as well as other vulnerable populations, have been critical of such open-science initiatives as threatening the privacy needs of their research participants, a concern Regan and Gonzaba address in their Mapping the Gay Guides digital history project: https://www.mappingthegayguides.org/ethics/
35 Fiona Barnett et al., “QueerOS: A User's Manual.” In Matthew K. Gold, Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 50–59, 1–2.
36 Bonnie Ruberg, Jason Boyd, and James Howe, “Toward a Queer Digital Humanities.” In Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities, eds. Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 108–128, 1.
37 Celine-Marie Pascale, Cartographies of Knowledge: Exploring Qualitative Epistemologies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010), 2.
38 Eguchi and Calafell, Queer Intercultural Communication, 3.
39 Ibid., 9.
40 Patrick R. Grzanka, “Queer Survey Research and the Ontological Dimensions of Heterosexism.” In Imagining Queer Methods, eds. Ghaziani and Brim, 84–101; Steven W. Thrasher, “Discursive Hustling and Queer of Color Interviewing.” In Imagining Queer Methods, eds. Ghaziani and Brim, 230–46.
41 Sandra G. Harding, Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Cary Nelson and Dilip Gaonkar, Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2013).
42 Dennis Mumby, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Communication Studies: A Rereading of an Ongoing Debate,” Communication Theory 7, no. 1 (1996): 1–28.
43 Craig, “Communication Theory as a Field,” Carey, Communication as Culture, Darren L. Linville and Brenden E. Kendall, “Teaching Metatheory through Venn diagramming,” Communication Teacher 29, no. 3 (2015): 135–40.
44 Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey S. John, and Ted Striphas, eds., Communication as … : Perspectives on Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005).
45 D. Travers Scott and Devon Powers, “Looking Back, Moving Forward: Critical Communication History,” International Journal of Communication 7 (2013): 1912–19. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/download/2398/979.
46 Kristina M. Scharp and Lindsey J. Thomas, “Disrupting the Humanities and Social Science Binary: Framing Communication Studies as a Transformative Discipline,” Review of Communication 19, no. 2 (2019): 147–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2019.1595702.
47 Waisbord, Communication: A post-discipline.
48 Mirjam Klaassens, Peter Groote, and Paulus P. P. Huigen, “Roadside Memorials from a Geographical Perspective,” Mortality 14, no. 2 (2009): 187–201. https://doi.org/10.1080/13576270902808068.
49 Marc Howard Ross, Slavery in the North: Forgetting History and Recovering Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Karen L. Cox, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (Durham: University North Carolina Press, 2021).
50 Andrew Denson, Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory (Chapel Hill: University North Carolina Press, 2017).
51 Barbie Zelizer, ed., Visual Culture and the Holocaust (London: A&C Black, 2001), Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
52 Carole Blair, “Collective Memory.” In Communication as … : Perspectives on Theory, eds. Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey S. John, and Ted Striphas (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 51–59.
53 Thomas R. Dunn, “Remembering ‘A Great Fag’: Visualizing Public Memory and the Construction of Queer Space,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 9, no. 74 (2011): 435–60, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.585168.
54 “About.” Monument Lab. https://monumentlab.com/about.
55 Fairfield Foundation, “Robert E. Lee Monument.” Sketchfab (2019) https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/robert-e-lee-monument-45b7ec8d435948e584b8364743e06cf0.
56 Omid Mohamad Nezami et al., “Automatic Recognition of Student Engagement Using Deep Learning and Facial Expression.” In Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (New York: Springer, 2019), 273–89.
57 Robert Musil, “Monuments.” In Robert Musil, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author Vol. 1 (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago, 2012), 61.
58 Aoun, Robot-proof.
59 Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip; Lee Edelman, No Future (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
60 While recognizing the reduction and essentialism this implied, we had hoped to subvert the AI by foregrounding and qualifying this information.
61 Ghaziani and Brim, Imagining Queer Methods, 45, emphasis original.
62 Thrasher, “Discursive Hustling,” 242.
63 Gandomi and Haider, “Beyond the Hype.”
64 One author, as a graduate student, was queried after a presentation if the film under discussion was “representative” of the entirety of global technology-based horror cinema, as if the German 1915 silent film The Golem and 2000 Hong Kong film Dial ‘D’ for Demon were discrete units that could be averaged together.
65 Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). See also Edelman, No Future.