Digital Project: Assessing RaceFail '09

Table of Contents
Project Overview
Background: RaceFail '09
Findings: Participants
Keyword Case Study: Black and White
Challenges and Future Applications
Special Features

Challenges and Future Applications

Challenges

Given that this was my first foray into DH work, the learning curve was a little steeper than I had expected. I am fairly certain that I both overextended and underutilized NVivo's capabilities, and am looking forward to meeting with our campus's research librarians to discuss this in the coming months. NVivo does, of course, have its own visualization tools, but I opted to use Flourish instead as it was a bit cleaner to import into a browser.

The biggest technical challenge, by far, was accessing files, as the migration away from LiveJournal has left many dead links in the current archive. Many of these have been captured via the Internet Archive, screencaptures, or FreezePage, but this formatting sometimes causes issues with NVivo.

Related to this, and embroiled in RaceFail '09 as a whole, is the ethical issue of mining and studying others' words. While all of the posts I chose are accessible to the public, I do wonder whether it was correct to include the screencapture of Teresa Nielsen Hayden's post in my corpus, as the original is no longer publicly available.

Future Applications

Going forward, I would like to expand this study to include a far larger number of posts across multiple platforms. I would also like to include multiple posts by the same authors, particularly John Scalzi, as he pretty famously lashed out then, in his words, walked himself back. Perhaps my loftiest future goal is to link RaceFail '09 and its aftermath (and positive outcomes) to not just the Sad/Rabid Puppies backlash of 2015 but to larger sociopolitical issues surrounding the treatment of race and, more broadly, issues of social justice, in present-day America. This may sound like a leap, but given the increased proximity of sff fandom to mainstream American culture, and the increased tendency of fandom toward issues of social justice, I believe there is much to explore.