POST: Reginold Royston and Digital Humanities Research and Pedagogy

As part of their “Documenting DH” oral history series, UW-Madison’s Digital Humanities Research Network conducted an interview with Reginold Royston (University of Wisconsin–Madison), in which he discusses how everything we do and post online is subject to critical analysis, and that “there are limits to the ways that we can think about traditional database questions and how to ask those [questions] computationally.”

From the abstract:

Reginold Royston is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin’s iSchool.  As a media and cultural studies scholar, he became interested in the digital humanities because he sees so much of our lives and what we do now as digital: “We live online, stream online and the stream has meaning.”  Royston’s research focuses on how Ghanaian, African and Black subjects produce and interact with media.  He analyzes Facebook posts, Tweets, Snapchats and more to better understand how social media and access to it shapes interpersonal relationships. In this interview, Royston talks about his own research, his classroom projects, the DH projects he loves (including the New York Public Library’s Green Books project, Slave Voyages and African Diasporas Ph.D) and some of the limitations he runs into doing digital humanities work.