This article1 introduces the Digital Culture and Design (DCD) program at Coastal Carolina University (CCU), which is an undergraduate digital humanities (DH) program pedagogically centred around critical making. Drawing from such thinkers as Jentery Sayers, Natalie Loveless, and Stephanie Springgay, we understand critical making expansively to include not just physical fabrication, but also critical-creative work in digital, even virtual, environments with digital tools.2 That is, in DCD we ground students’ theoretical understandings of digital technology in hands-on, practical engagement with that technology—even when that engagement takes place in a virtual, web-based, or otherwise apparently “immaterial” environment. We do this in part because the notion that critical making means only or even primarily physical (i.e. non-virtual) fabrication threatens to re-ascribe immateriality to the digital.3 In a practical sense, teaching critical making as both physical fabrication and asset creation for digital environments trains students to be critically minded about the materials they make, which are often in and for digital platforms.

In a programmatic sense, we keep the making critical by striking a balance between DH theory and DH methods across our curriculum and in our classes. Here, we explain how we strike this balance in order to offer both a framework for building new DH programs and concrete curricular ideas for teaching DH classes. We begin by situating our program and its students within wider cultural frameworks, focusing on the ways DCD has been developed to best serve our particular student population. We then turn to a curricular overview, which is itself grounded in two case studies from our curriculum. The case studies provide an in-depth view of how we balance DH theory and methods through critical making pedagogy. We close by sketching the variety of professional paths for which the DCD program prepares its graduates.

The Digital Culture and Design program

Coastal Carolina University (CCU) is a comprehensive public regional liberal arts Research 3 university in Conway, South Carolina, close to Myrtle Beach.4 CCU has an undergraduate student body of approximately 10,000, 30% of which are students of colour; over 55% of which are women or gender minorities (“Coastal Carolina University Undergraduate Demographic Report” 2); over 25% of which are first-generation students (DiMatteo); and 64% of which were on need-based financial aid (with 34% on Pell Grants, specifically) in Fall 2020 (“Coastal Carolina University Tuition & Financial Aid”).5 While demographic data can only tell us so much, it does provide a quickly accessible snapshot of our student body, particularly with regard to how our students intersect with matrices of systemic privilege. Guided by feminist pedagogies of care, we articulate the contours of our students’ positionality relative to identity factors including class, gender, and race in part to provide a sense of their collective pre-existing knowledge and experience within the field of DH when they enter our classroom.6 Generally speaking, our students will not enter the major with prior knowledge of coding; they will rarely have had opportunities to play with, and potentially break, technological or computational materials; and they are students for whom the stakes of failure—a core pedagogical value to critical making—are financially, socially, emotionally, and culturally very high. Bearing this in mind, and as we expand in the case studies that follow, our classes value metacognitive reflection on project design along with, and sometimes even more than, execution of the project itself. In this way, we normalize interim failure and troubleshooting as integral steps to moving a project from conception to fruition. As faculty members at Coastal, we have seen how powerful and transformational this critical making space can be because it empowers students to value their lived experience and embodied knowledge, to situate it among wider cultural contexts, and, sometimes, even to formulate systemic critiques of power and privilege.

Entering the CCU catalogue in 2016, and with the first dedicated tenure-track hire (Laiola) starting in the 2018-19 academic year, DCD is an undergraduate DH program housed in the Department of English within the College of Humanities and Fine Arts. In Spring 2018, the program conferred its first BA degree, and since Fall 2020 we have conferred 38 BA degrees. The program is currently supported by two tenure-track assistant professors of Digital Culture and Design (one of whom is Mukamal), one associate professor of Digital Culture and Design (Laiola), and one associate professor of English. While we (the authors) were not directly involved in designing the major, we do collaborate in developing and running, often for the first time, the major’s required courses, and one author (Laiola) has served as the program director since 2020. As of this writing, we have approximately 40 enrolled majors, who find a home in our major for a variety of interest-driven and professional goals, which we enumerate in the closing section.

The major begins with a six-course foundation at the lower division level, then moves to an upper-division sequence in both theory and methods, as Figure 1 illustrates. The foundation introduces students to practices of critically engaging with technology while developing their hands-on skills in making, creating, and storytelling in digital environments with digital technologies. This critical engagement includes practices like close reading user interfaces, understanding how form (medium) and content (message) are intertwined, asking critical questions of algorithmic design, and considering broader human impacts of popular technologies beyond students’ own experiences with them. Complementing this is their hands-on work, which comprises coding (typically through HTML, CSS, and Python), designing for the web, wireframing and prototyping, and working in unfamiliar digital and multimedia authoring environments (Microsoft Sway, Twine, ArcGIS Story Maps, Ren'Py). This six-course foundation provides students with both a capacious DH vocabulary and a kind of “experiential praxis” that they then operationalize in their upper-division courses.

The upper-division DH theory sequence is made up of classes that offer cultural studies of new media and digital cultures. The “bridge” class into the upper division, “Special Topics in Digital Studies,” provides students an opportunity to deeply engage with a given topic that varies by semester and by instructor. Recent examples taught by the authors include an introduction to the digital novel, banned books from a digital perspective, art-making in the age of generative AI, and feminist histories of craft and code.7 “Film, New Media, and Culture” focuses on close reading multimedia, often pop cultural, texts such as film, television, podcasts, or video games and reflecting on that engagement through critical making of multimedia essays and other digital artifacts. “Interactivity and Culture” explores how people interact with, and immerse themselves within, different media cultures, and is described further in the case studies below. “Digital Resources in the Humanities” probes how resources ranging from digital databases, data-driven multimedia essays, and even generative AI interfaces enable us to engage key humanities topics such as identity, equity, history, human geographies, or the social life of art. Finally, “Social Media” engages with digital social media, the myriad ways they affect on- and offline culture, and the potentials they introduce for critical and creative expression.

Balancing this DH Theory sequence is our upper-division DH Methods sequence, which is organized around four modalities of digital storytelling and the methods that support those modalities: Text, Visual, Interactive, and Sound and Motion Methods. Students choose three of the four Methods based on their interests and career goals. Each class focuses on hands-on making grounded in theoretical perspectives. In these courses, students practice technical skill-building in areas that are particularly legible on the job market, from metadata collection and analysis (Simple Scraper, Google Forms, Qualtrics) to computational text analysis (Voyant Tools, topic modelling, principal component analysis), data visualization (Excel, Tableau), visual storytelling (Canva, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop), interactive storytelling (Twine, Inform 7, Inky, Ren'Py, Unity), and audio-visual storytelling (Audacity, Premiere Pro, iMovie, Podcastle.ai).

In addition to three of four DCD-specific methods, students also choose from a variety of interdisciplinary methods from across the College of Humanities and Fine Arts. These methods include courses such as “Print and Online News Practices,” “Digital Cartography,” “Digital History,” “Music Recording Technology,” “Video Game Worlds,” and “Computer Aided Drafting and Design for Theater.” These additional classes help make explicit the interdisciplinarity of the major while enabling students to specialize. Even so, many students specialize further by pairing their DCD major with existing minors such as Film and Production Studies or Computer Application Development, and/or certificates such as Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) or Cultural Heritage Studies.

Finally, the major culminates with an experiential learning requirement and a senior capstone class. For experiential learning, students may choose between completing a practicum or an internship. While the internship follows the familiar model of students working as a kind of apprentice under direct supervision,8 practicum entails working closely with a Coastal faculty member to collaborate on a sustained, often research-based, and sometimes public-facing or service-oriented project. (We offer a more detailed instance of Practicum in the second case study below). The senior capstone class is both retrospective and forward-facing; students engage in a self-reflexive, meta-critical evaluation of their time in the DCD major and take concrete steps to prepare for their future. Students are guided in self-inventory of their particular technical strengths and weaknesses as aligned with their interests, values, and goals in curating a public-facing portfolio, which both showcases their work in the major and sets them up to transition into their chosen career field.9

Case studies

In this section, we turn to two case studies from our curriculum to demonstrate how we embed critical making and interdisciplinary thinking into the DCD program at every level.

Case study: “Interactivity and Culture”

“Interactivity and Culture” introduces concepts and practices of interactivity historically and within new media and digital culture. The class takes “interactivity” to mean interacting with each other discursively as conditioned by media culture(s) in which we are immersed. In Fall 2022,10 Mukamal’s class was grounded in the topic of climate change as communicated, on the one hand, through print media cultures (newspapers, magazines), and on the other, through online social media cultures. We began with reading from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) as an example of climate activism in a print media environment.11 We then contrasted Carson, her print-based activism, and her historical reception with the media practices and reception of contemporary climate activist Greta Thunberg, who has used social media to uplift her marginalized voice as a neurodivergent teenage girl. Students saw how 20th century women trailblazers were often subject to the same gendered critiques as those of today.

Through these cultural studies lessons, students learned how to conduct DH research by gathering and distilling data from digital archives of print-based documents in order to formulate an original narrative or argument. This process informed the development of their own data-driven research project on a social issue of their choice. Enacting feminist pedagogies of care, there is dedicated time in the syllabus and schedule wherein I (Mukamal) guide students in reflecting on their own embodied knowledge, identity, positionality, values, and commitments, with the goal that this reflection inspires a choice of topic. Where some students did choose to stay with and expand on the topic of climate change—studying, for instance, the question of having children in a world of climate and polycrisis—others went in different directions, often grounded in their own communities, from community-building through competitive video gaming, to experiences of body dysmorphia in competitive performing arts environments, to embodied perspectives of the LGBTQIA+ community on organized religion.

The students’ primary research method was the creation and distribution of a digital poll in Google Forms featuring questions that solicited both quantitative and qualitative data from a target population.12 Recognizing that the goal was to produce a cultural narrative from this data, we covered the ethics of data collection as well as best practices for designing questions that would produce data that students could analyze through practices like computational text analysis (using Voyant Tools), data visualization (using Excel and/or Tableau), and qualitative coding (identifying, usually by hand, major threads or themes in narrative-based data).13 Stemming from the cultural studies lessons discussed above, and from a data feminist perspective I guide students in thinking of the work of visualizing data as the work of critical making; doing so requires considering not only how to construct a story through data, but also what their data showed, what their data could not show, what biases went into its construction, and ways to balance individual respondents’ voices within broader-scale patterns.14 Students produced a born-digital data-driven story that articulated their research question, explained their target population, outlined their method and then narrated their findings through data visualizations and expository prose; by design, this is a critical moment when students face the necessity of failure and iteration in the research process. Often, either their poll design failed to elicit data that could adequately address the question they sought to answer or their data visualizations failed to effectively storytell their data. Yet this failure is both necessary and pedagogically productive. For this reason, the project’s final component is a “critical maker statement” wherein students reflect on their project’s failures, which in turn, elevates their research process over their final product.

Data-driven storytelling helps students move from observation (“feeling like” something is happening) to demonstrable trend (something is happening), from individual embodied experience to the macro-level power systems that condition those experiences. The data-driven story, then, constitutes a mode of not just critical making, but also social justice work. As a concrete example of critical making qua social justice, one student drew on her embodied experience as a student-athlete on the university’s Women’s Soccer Team to investigate the relationship between student-athletes across CCU Athletics teams and mental health (Smith “Student-Athletes and Mental Health”).15 She designed a research poll and circulated it on a communications app for student-athletes. Some of her findings were striking. To name a few trends: where only 24.1% of respondents reported struggling with mental illness prior to their NCAA careers, 75.9% reported that they experienced mental health struggles only after beginning their NCAA career. The majority of respondents reported “sometimes” or “often” feeling anxiety, a lack of motivation, overwhelmed, fatigued, mental burnout or exhaustion, and unappreciated by teammates and/or coaches. Major influences to declining mental health were cited as coaches, internal pressures, and balancing school and athletics. Finally, when asked about their comfort levels talking about their mental health with coaching staff, only 24% reported being comfortable (with 60% of respondents reporting explicit discomfort) (Smith, “Student-Athletes and Mental Health”).

In addition to data collection and research practices, this class emphasized purposefully and creatively narrativizing both qualitative and quantitative data and even, following principles from Lauren F. Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio’s Data Feminism (2020), visceralizing this data—that is, heightening affect and making its narrative felt. To this end, and as Figure 2 shows, in addition to traditional data visualizations like bar charts and pie charts, this student stylized pull-quotes as a form of data visualization that highlight individual respondents’ words alongside broader trends, made effective affective use of word clouds to showcase frequently occurring words in free response answers, and used emojis as visual signifiers of emotional states.

The student described this semester-long project as both deeply impactful and empowering to her because she was able to connect her personal experiences to a wider collective. As well, she was able to articulate through data what she had previously intuited. She turned her findings into advocacy by approaching her coaching staff with the findings with the goal of improving conditions within women’s soccer. Indeed, in the following semester in the course “Digital Resources in the Humanities,” she returned to this topic, driven both by her continuing interest and the fact there had been a coincidental change in coaching staff. Since coaching staff had been a major factor in student-athlete mental health in her previous study, she wanted to delve deeper into the impact of coaching staff on her target population, which in this next iteration of the project she narrowed to her own team. In a powerful elaboration of her earlier findings, she ultimately identified coaches’ practical efforts to normalize and facilitate conversations about athletes’ mental health as critical to both her and her teammates’ well-being. This sustained work across classes, semesters, and indeed the student’s undergraduate academic career epitomizes how critical making can carry throughout an undergraduate DH curriculum at every level, especially when employed as a method for probing issues that really matter to students.

Case study: “Social Media Practicum”

Practicum is a course that students may take after they have completed the majority of their coursework, and that is one option for fulfilling the major’s experiential learning requirement by offering a hands-on, expertise-building pedagogical experience where students work closely on a sustained project with a Coastal faculty member. For Social Media Practicum, each semester I (Laiola) select a group of 3-5 students who have taken our “Social Media” course and who have an interest in working professionally in social media.16 As in an internship, these students work as a team of content creators for the social media accounts run by the English department and DCD program. As of this writing (Spring 2024), the team actively manages four accounts: an Instagram and Facebook account for the DCD program and an Instagram and Facebook account for the English department.

Developing professional skills in social media content creation and brand management is the primary objective of this class. To this end, students work as a team on all aspects of our social media presence. Each semester, we begin by setting up a brand kit wherein students select fonts, colours, and a governing aesthetic for content. Throughout the semester, students contribute to a “living document” that describes editorial and procedural guidelines on everything from copy-editing rules for captions, to hardware requirements for video, to the temporality of posting about campus events or advertising opportunities. Along the way, they develop proficiency in professional content management and creation software including Hootsuite, Canva, Figma, and Meta Business Suite. In addition to technical skills, students also learn strategies for determining the kinds of content appropriate to a given brand, through our weekly team meetings when we discuss what kinds of content to produce. These discussions can range from immediate content needs (e.g. advertising for upcoming events and opportunities) to more open-form, playful content that is less temporally constrained (e.g. creating a version of a trend/meme to enhance discoverability while communicating our brand);17 to more critical humanities discussions of the appropriateness of certain types of content creation (e.g. which holidays and days of remembrance to prioritize in our feed).18 Indeed, these discussions have led to our prioritization of Instagram as the most popular and accessible platform to our target population of current and prospective students, and increasingly their family and friend networks.

While the social media practicum certainly achieves these wider learning outcomes, it is also complicit in broader systemic issues regarding internships and academic credit because the work students are doing constitutes labour, currently unpaid, for the department and program. As of this writing, the authors regularly advocate for creating paid positions through which students could be compensated for this and similar work. In the meantime, the Practicum model currently offers students tangible benefits including the professionalization skills detailed above along with an employment experience grounded in a supervision and mentorship model informed by pedagogies of care. Indeed, several Practicum students have gone on to paid or unpaid internships and jobs in social media and other related (digital) writing fields that they gained in part thanks to their Practicum experience.

While the area of content creation is culturally perceived as uncritical (Lawrence 2, 33)—and indeed, it is advertising by another name—in Practicum we approach this work as a critical making project. Certainly we make content to advertise courses, celebrate awards, and otherwise document Department goings-on, which does not necessitate a critical approach. However, as we (the authors) will demonstrate through the following three examples, we (the Practicum team) challenge this perceived absence of criticality throughout the content creation process.

Our first example considers how we have recently responded to political climates and politicized events on campus. During the 2022-23 school year, our university held a series of events around book banning, a particularly salient issue for us in South Carolina (SC).19 In March 2023, we held the second in a series of events on the phenomenon, with an emphasis on Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir, a graphic memoir that students and community members voted to read together and discuss.20 A group of students attended with a clear agenda to disrupt and promote vitriolic bad-faith arguments on topics ranging from the ethics of book banning to transphobia. We later learned that these students were involved with Turning Point USA, a “conservative grassroots activist network on high school and college campuses across the country” (over 3500 by their count) that “promote[s] the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government” (“About”).21 The Coastal chapter of Turning Point USA made an Instagram post that characterized both the event and Kobabe’s text through the lens of homophobic and transphobic moral panic.22 Faculty members in the University Libraries and the Department of English, who sponsored the event, quickly decided to write and issue their own statement rearticulating the pedagogical goals of engaging both (challenges to) Kobabe’s text and the broader conversation around book banning. They requested that the social media team package and post the statement, which still lives on our social media spaces and is captured in Figure 3.

The content creation process of repackaging this text-based statement for Instagram enabled the social media team a forum for real-time conversations about algorithmic amplification. In the first place, we discussed sharing the statement as a short video, or “reel” in Instagram’s parlance, to take advantage of Instagram’s prioritization of reels in their attempts to compete with TikTok. In the second place, we discussed the tactics for minimizing the spread of Coastal’s Turning Point chapter’s post by sharing a screenshot of the post within team communications rather than directing hyperlinked traffic to the post itself. While in other DCD courses, students learn about algorithmic amplification, those lessons remain more theoretical than practical. Here, the reverse is true. As well, this content creation offered us opportunities for broader discussions about strategies used by right-wing groups on- and offline (e.g. trolling and purposeful mischaracterization), strategies for interfacing with this trolling (e.g. recognizing that commenting on a post will not redirect a narrative), and strategies for avoiding further amplification of that discourse (e.g. not tagging Coastal’s Turning Point chapter account in the caption). We cite this here as an example of critical making for social media because it constitutes a deeply critical and socially aware process for making content that differs, sometimes quite radically, from what we might be more familiar with creating and even consuming on social media.

Our second example of social media content creation as critical making practice pertains to accessibility. We require that our content be as accessible as possible given media and platform constraints. In the case of Instagram, this often means providing accurate and meaningful alt-text for static images, which the platform enabled in 2018. It’s worth noting that Instagram automatically creates a kind of alt-text for its images. In Instagram’s own words: “The [automatic alt-text] feature uses Object Recognition Technology to generate a description of photos for screen readers, so you can hear a list of items that photos may contain as you browse the app” (“Improved Accessibility Through Alternative Text Support”). While users can add their own alt-text, they do not have backend access to the automatically generated descriptors. This means that they are unable to add context, ensure accuracy, or even recognize the potential for their content to be misrepresented to audiences. Perhaps because this feature is hidden in Advanced Settings, inclusively-minded users have developed the practice of using Instagram’s photo caption space to provide image descriptions.23 We employ this practice in addition to embedding alt-text metadata in Advanced Settings in order to simultaneously ensure accuracy of alt-texts for users with screen-readers and render visible the necessity of creating accessible content. Figure 3 provides an example of this. Here, the underlying lesson is one of creating content that both aligns with and manifests our values within platforms that don’t necessarily share or prioritize them—a lesson, as with our previous example, that we materialize through hands-on critical making of content.

Our final example is, perhaps paradoxically, about how we decide when to stop creating content on a given platform. In the earliest iteration of the Social Media Practicum (Fall 2022), the team also managed accounts for DCD and English on Twitter. On November 28, 2022 our @DCDatCCU account sent our last (and currently pinned) Tweet, captured in Figure 3. The Tweet simply notes that our Twitter accounts would go dormant for a period of time. This decision immediately followed Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform, after which he radically reduced critical personnel, including those dedicated to content moderation. As a result of this policy change, the platform saw a rise in vitriolic, racist, sexist, trolling content.24 Indeed, at our first Practicum meeting following Musk’s purchase of the platform, the student team was concerned about the changes they had seen in their feeds. As a group, we weighed the benefits of remaining on the platform with user experiences on the new, less moderated platform. Overall, we had to consider the ethics of continuing to create content for a platform whose vision and purpose no longer seemed to align with ours. We therefore decided to effectively push “pause” on our accounts. As of this writing, we are still biding our time until (and if) the platform becomes again a place where we want to spend our time and engage with our audiences. What this last example concretizes is less working against a system from within and more the power of opting out of a system altogether—a choice with material consequences for the business model of social media but that is rarely, especially for our students, considered an option.

Beyond the Classroom

The DCD program holistically empowers students to develop skills in using digital technologies and platforms in a way that prioritizes both process over product and human experience over machine logic. While maintaining this value system, the program prepares students for the ever-evolving realities of the 21st-century job market. It is also, as our inclusive, equity-driven pedagogy evinces, a space where skills like tolerating frustration, practising self-reflection, understanding positionality within power structures, iterating one’s own value systems, and striving for empathy are critical to finding and maintaining a career.

These and more quantifiable technical skills prepare students for work in a wide range of humanities and technology-related fields: (digital) publishing, digital and social media marketing, social media and large corpus text analytics, graphic and user interface design, and digital activism or community-engaged digital work.25 It’s worth noting that the program also prepares students for careers that perhaps could not have been envisioned when our program was designed, for instance, in fields that have radically changed since the program’s conception (e.g. anything in social media, from brand management to digital journalism) or in fields that effectively didn’t exist several years ago (e.g. generative AI prompt engineering or web3 content creation). Whichever career paths students choose to follow, they all graduate with a critical-theoretical and practical skillset that informs how they make and use the technological-as-human systems that increasingly govern our lives and our connections to each other.

Works Cited

Turning Point USA, “About TPUSA,” 2019, Accessed Aug. 15, 2023.

“Book Banning from a Digital Perspective: A collaborative data-driven storytelling project.” ArcGIS Story Maps, 26 Apr. 2023, Accessed 14 Aug. 2023, https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7318476794484842ac1bed31420ebc7c.

Chess, Shira and Adrienne Shaw. “A Conspiracy of Fishes, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying About #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Volume 59, Issue 1, pp. 208–220, https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2014.999917.

“Coastal Carolina University Tuition & Financial Aid.” U.S. News & World Report, Accessed 14 Aug. 2023, https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/coastal-carolina-university-3451/paying.

“Coastal Carolina University Undergraduate Demographic Report Fall 2022.” Office of Institutional Research, Assessment, and Analysis. Accessed 14 Aug. 2023, https://www.coastal.edu/media/2015ccuwebsite/contentassets/images/documents/iraa/demographics/demographic_ugfa22.pdf.

Coastal English. [@coastalenglish and @dcdatccu]. Instagram, 15 Jan. 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/Cr_emonLvOW/.

Digital Culture & Design. [@dcdatccu and @coastalenglish]. Instagram, 15 Jan. 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/C2H4TGjr_iA/.

DiMatteo, Olivia. “The Future is First-Gen: Edwards College Celebrates First-Generation Students By Creating a Network of Support and Accessibility.” Tapestry Magazine, Spring 2020, Accessed 14 Aug. 2023, https://www.coastal.edu/humanities/tapestrymagazine/tapestryspring2020/thefutureisfirst-gen/.

Professor Watchlist. “Exposing Bias on Campus.” 2023, Accessed 15 Aug. 2023.

“Federal Pell Grants Are Usually Awarded Only to Undergraduate Student .” Federal Student Aid: An Office of the U.S. Department of Education. Accessed 14 Aug. 2023, https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/grants/pell.

Frenkel, Sheera and Kate Conger. “Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find.” The New York Times, 2 Dec. 2022, Accessed 14 Aug. 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-speech.html.

Friedman, Jonathan, et al. “Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools.” Edited by Nadine Farid Johnson, Summer Lopez, and Jeremy C. Young. PEN America, 19 Sept. 2023, Accessed 14 Aug. 2023, https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor-books-in-schools/.

Friedman, Jonathan, et al. “Banned in the USA: Rising School Book Bans Threaten Free Expression and Students’ First Amendment Rights.” Edited by James Tager, Summer Lopez, and Suzanne Nossel. PEN America, Apr. 2022, Accessed 14 Aug. 2023, https://pen.org/banned-in-the-usa/. Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20230831065100/https://pen.org/banned-in-the-usa/.

“Improved Accessibility Through Alternative Text Support.” Instagram blog: Announcements. 28 Nov. 2018, Accessed 14 Aug. 2023, https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/improved-accessibility-through-alternative-text-support.

Johnson, Greg. “Mental Health Issues Remain on Minds of Student-Athletes: More Than 9,800 Responded to Well-Being Survey.” NCAA News, 24 May 2022, Accessed 14 Aug. 2023, https://www.ncaa.org/news/2022/5/24/media-center-mental-health-issues-remain-on-minds-of-student-athletes.aspx.

Lavender, Margaret. “Featured Projects.” Capstone Portfolio, 5 May 2023, Accessed 15 Aug. 2023, https://margaretlavender.wixsite.com/capstone-portfolio.

Lawrence, Dan. Digital Writing: A Guide to Writing for Social Media and the Web. Broadview Press, 2022.

Meehan, Kasey, et al. “Banned in the USA: State Laws Supercharge Book Suppression in Schools.” Edited by Nadine Farid Johnson and Summer Lopez. PEN America, 20 Apr. 2023, Accessed 14 Aug. 2023, https://pen.org/report/banned-in-the-usa-state-laws-supercharge-book-suppression-in-schools/.

Paul, Katie and Sheila Dang. “Exclusive: Twitter Leans on Automation to Moderate Content as Harmful Speech Surges.” Reuters, 5 Dec. 2022, Accessed 14 Aug. 2023, https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-exec-says-moving-fast-moderation-harmful-content-surges-2022-12-03/.

Roberts, Sarah T. [@ubiquity75]. “FYI, reporters: Around 3,000+ contractor employees of Twitter were canned last night (totally normal thing to do, btw). How does Twitter have so many contractors? This is where the CONTENT MODERATOR numbers are hidden. They are called “agents” at Twitter.” Twitter, 13 Nov. 2022, https://twitter.com/ubiquity75/status/1591805360255692800.

Sayers, Jentery. editor. Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Shattuck, Leslie. “Digital Creator.” Portfolio, 6 May 2023, Accessed 15 Aug. 2023, https://lsshattuc.wixsite.com/portfolio.

Smith, Jordyn. “About Me.” Jordyn Smith / Creative Visionary, 5 Dec. 2023, Accessed 19 Feb. 2024, https://jlsmith141428.wixsite.com/portfolio.

———. “Student-Athletes and Mental Health: An Analytical Look into the Association Between Collegiate Athletics and Mental Well-Being.” ArcGIS Story Maps, 9 Dec. 2022, Accessed 14 Aug. 2023, https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/3826aa609e854f56b84ec9fa02b31f0b.