Picture This: The Screenshot's Use in Digital Humanities Scholarship

When I Consider the Codes and Transformations that Frame Our Approaches to Analyzing Black Culture in the Digital Age, I prefer to focus on the simple rather than the complex. The array of tools and approaches available in the field, which allow us to perform complicated tasks such as parsing binary code to map relations across space and time, offer a number of points of departure. While some of my work has contributed to big-data analyses of social movements containing legions of actors, texts, and artifacts, it is powered by a distinctly analog data-collection process, one that depends on intimate knowledge of the field, the site of inquiry, and the participants. To examine the cultural complexities of social-media-fueled social movements, and the construction of networked communities out of which they grow, I often rely on a rather unsophisticated data-collection tool available to just about anyone with access to a computer screen or a smartphone: the Screenshot.