May 1, 2023 Digital Matters Fall 2023, Faculty and Graduate Fellow Announcement

Digital Matters is thrilled to announce the addition of new Faculty and Graduate Fellows to our team for the Fall of 2023. These individuals bring with them a wealth of knowledge and experience that will undoubtedly contribute to the field of digital humanities and we look forward to the new ideas and perspectives they will bring to our work.

Kevin Coe – News Coverage of U.S. Mass Shootings, 2013-2022: Comparative Insights from Automated and Manual Content Analyses.

Mass shootings are a tragically familiar element of U.S. public life, one that most people experience primarily through news coverage. Researchers have begun to study the content and effects of this news coverage, focusing primarily on comparisons of a small number of high-profile shootings. This project takes a broader approach, examining national news coverage of every high-casualty mass shooting from 2013–2022, a total of 241 events. To do so, I employ multiple forms of content analysis, including both manual (i.e., content patterns identified by humans) and automated (i.e., content patterns identified by computers) approaches. Beyond providing extensive insights into a large sample of important news coverage, this approach has the advantage of allowing for direct methodological comparisons of different modes of content analysis, something rarely done in content analytic research.

Lien Fan Shen – Empowering Comic Artists with DALL-E, AI Imaging Generating Program

The objective of this project is to empower comic artists with the use of DALL-E, a state-of-the-art image generation AI model developed by OpenAI. The proposed project will explore the potential of DALL-E as a creative tool for comic artists, enabling them to create highly detailed and imaginative artwork more efficiently. The project aims to create a pilot project to showcase the potential of utilizing AI in creative process. The conventional creative process of comic production involves brainstorming ideas, creating sketch thumbnails, revising thumbnails for storyboards, and final art production. Imaging generation AI has the potential to revolutionize the comic industry by providing comic artists with a new tool for generating highly detailed and imaginative artwork more efficiently. This project aims to empower comic artists with the use of AI and explore new techniques and applications in the comic creation process, enabling comic artists to innovate and push the boundaries of the industry.

Maggie Scholle – For the Birds? : Place Attachment and Spatial Processes at Lee Kay Ponds

My research with Digital Matters is a geographic and archival extension of my thesis project at Lee Kay Ponds, a conservation area and shooting range on the west side of Salt Lake City. Over the summer, I’ll be conducting site visits and interviews with visitors to the area with the goal of understanding how individuals and groups situate themselves in the place and understand the area in relation to the surrounding geography and land use. With Digital Matters, I will work to create an ArcGIS StoryMap and other geographic visualizations showing place attachment, access, and barriers to access at the site, and will create an oral history interview repository to archive the stories that folks are willing to share with me through the course of the project.