Mar 23, 2026 Joseph Mayaki, Fall 2025 Graduate Fellow, Digital Humanities Approaches to Online Grief Narratives

Digital Humanities in Online Grief Management: Analyzing Online Grief Narratives for Therapeutic and Educational Insights 

1. Briefly describe your project and the challenges, lessons learned, and obstacles overcome in the execution of it. What were the professional, academic, and personal motivations underlying your project?

My project explores digital grief narratives as rhetorical artifacts. It examines how people entextualize loss in online communities and how these expressions function therapeutically. Drawing on a large corpus of user-generated grief narratives, I combine rhetorical analysis with emerging digital humanities methods, particularly sentiment mapping and pattern recognition, to trace how grief is articulated, shared, and collectively negotiated in networked spaces.

One major challenge was methodological: translating deeply affective, ethically sensitive experiences into analyzable data without flattening their emotional complexity. This required balancing interpretive rigor with ethical care, especially around representation, anonymity, and the limits of computational abstraction. I also had to navigate the technical learning curve of digital tools while ensuring they served, rather than overshadowed, rhetorical inquiry.

Professionally and academically, the project is motivated by my broader research on rhetoric, health humanities, and grief-informed pedagogy, particularly how writing functions as both expression and care. Personally, it is shaped by my long-standing interest in the relationship between grief and meaning-making. The Digital Matters fellowship provided a crucial space to integrate these commitments, enabling me to think more expansively about how digital methods can illuminate human vulnerability without diminishing its depth.

2. How did the Digital Matters internship dovetail with your academic pursuits? What interested you in applying for this grant?

The Digital Matters fellowship aligned closely with my academic work in rhetoric, digital humanities, and health humanities, particularly my focus on online grief communities as sites of rhetorical and therapeutic meaning-making. It provided an ideal context to extend my theoretical interests into methodological practice, which allows me to experiment with digital tools for analyzing large-scale narrative data.

I was especially motivated to apply because of the opportunity to gain new methodological insights and deepen my engagement with digital research approaches. Equally important was the dedicated time the fellowship created by relieving me of teaching responsibilities. That uninterrupted space proved invaluable. It allowed me to concentrate fully on my project, refine my analytical framework, and make significant progress in ways that would have been difficult within the usual demands of teaching. Overall, the experience was both intellectually generative and practically enabling, marking one of the most productive periods of my research trajectory.

3. What insights have you gained in regard to your specific field as a result of your project and grant experience?

During this fellowship, I expanded my methodological repertoire within digital humanities, moving beyond familiar tools like Voyant and AntConc to a broader ecosystem of other no-code and low-code platforms. I gained practical insight into tools for data harvesting, visualization, and sentiment analysis, which enabled me to work more efficiently with large-scale grief narratives while maintaining interpretive depth. These tools also helped bridge qualitative rhetorical analysis with computational methods in accessible ways.

4. What would you tell potential intern applicants to help them shape their own digital scholarship project?

The Digital Matters unit is an excellent environment for emerging digital scholars. You’ll find excellent collaboration, intellectual vibrancy, and strong support. The director and facilitators are genuinely invested in fellows’ growth and are always willing to offer thoughtful guidance at every stage of a project.

For prospective applicants, I would recommend approaching your project with both clarity and openness. Have a defined research question but remain flexible enough to let digital methods reshape how you think about your data. If your work intersects with digital humanities in any way, this is an opportunity worth pursuing. Take full advantage of the community’s peer feedback, workshops, and informal conversations as they often become as valuable as the tools themselves.