Abstract
The emergence of digital media and platforms led to a renewed interest in data-driven tools in the humanities, often labelled “digital humanities”. Such data-driven methods offer interesting insights, especially when they are combined with qualitative data on platforms, users, data and communities. By relying on both close reading and distant reading of data, this chapter shows how users produce data and actively reflect on related components, such as filtering, moderation and algorithms. Specifically, the analysis focuses on user responses to the change in policies and algorithms on Tumblr (2018) and YouTube (2019). These cases are illustrative of how content moderation, through new policies and algorithms, can affect user cultures. Overall, users are not passive audiences in these processes but identify tactics to cope with these changes.
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Lamerichs, N. (2020). User Tactics and Algorithms: A Digital Humanities Approach to YouTube and Tumblr. In: Nguyen, D., Dekker, I., Nguyen, S. (eds) Understanding Media and Society in the Age of Digitalisation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38577-4_3
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