Keeping the Human in Digital Humanities: A Twitter Case Study

The rapid expansion of digital humanities has led to questions about how best to define this emerging field and how to harness the new approaches to knowledge that it offers. In this thesis, I explore key characteristics of digital humanities. I also hope to show ways that digital humanities methods can be applied with a case study related to vaccine conversations on Twitter. I will first discuss three key characteristics of digital humanities: interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and democratization. Next, I will explore how these characteristics influence the activities of this field, particularly the ways that computers and programs (machines) relate to humans through intellectual work. Finally, I will apply what I have discussed to analyze Twitter conversations with the hashtags, #vaccines, #vaccineswork, and #antivaxx. The goal is to use digital humanities approaches to understand how vaccine rhetoric is used on the internet and how misinformation can be spread.Bachelor of Art