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Less digital, more humanities, please: The Viral Text’s Project

The Viral Text’s Project is a digital humanities project that aims to help scholars understand the themes and decisions that helped newspaper content ‘go viral’ before going viral was the hip thing to do. The project created an algorithm that ‘reads’ newspapers and traces its reprinting in other areas. By following the reprints they visualize how certain newspaper trends went ‘viral’. 

Most newspapers at the time did not have intellectual property rights, so editors and publishers of papers in smaller cities would literally cut and paste the newspaper sections from larger newspapers into their local papers. This created a sort of modge-podge of ‘viral’ material that publishers thought their readers might be interested in.

Below is a presentation I gave for a Digital Humanities course which asked students to constructively critique and assess a digital humanities website. The Viral Texts Project was the focus of my presentation.

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Assessing Accessibility in the Digital Humanities

It is easy to forget the things we take for granted. That’s sort of why we take them for granted in the first place. When tasks don’t require much planning or strain, our brains don’t seem to work as hard, and so those little things slip through the cracks as our synapses prune and make more room for other ‘more relevant’ information. But what seems to be easiest to forget is that we still get a say in what counts as relevant. Ask any tutor the best way to study material and they’ll tell you to involve multiple senses, to try different techniques; basically to make your brain do new kinds of work. Reading the textbook isn’t enough. You have to quiz yourself, make flashcards, study while you exercise, pace yourself . . . there is a lot of thought that goes into making those tidbits of information memorable, of making them more relevant.

Original caption: “Disabled veteran, ca. 1943” from the US National Archives

One area where this effort to make overlooked information relevant is accessibility. Too frequently we design buildings, create technological devices, or program software, to enhance the quality of life for able-bodied individuals. There is such focus on traditional, idealized progress that other individuals get left behind. In the clamber to make life easy, we sometimes make tasks more difficult for those with cognitive, motor, visual, or auditory disabilities.

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