👋 Hi, I’m Brandon M. Daniels, a PhD graduate in Communication from the University of Colorado Boulder. I have a background in the academic humanities, but I tinker, hack, and investigate with computers. I use computational methods to investigate human language use, interpret trends and patterns, and communicate findings in a clear and effective manner. I'm proficient in python and established practices of statistical inferencing and data vizualization. I use natural language processing techniques to understand textual datasets ranging from small and curated corpora to unstructured social media data.
👀 I’m interested in cultural analytics, natural language processing, and the digital humanities.
📫 How to reach me: brandon.daniels@colorado.edu
✍️ Interested in my writing? View my publication page on Google Scholar
https://github.com/brandon-daniels/Mediality-of-Teacher-Strikes/
My dissertation examines a wave of teacher strikes from 2018-2019. While it relies on multiple methods of qualitative and quantitative inquiry, the fourth chapter in my dissertation uses computational tools of natural language processing to analyze characteristics of a dataset of tweets about the strikes. I use the methods of topic modelling and geoparsing to explore the temporality and spatiality of discourse about the strikes. These methods reveal how the platform of Twitter shapes the discourse of its users, and how the events of the strikes impacted the language choices made by participants in the hashtag conversation.
http://digitaleldiario.com/poetics-of-chicanx-student-activists/
This essay was developed out of a collaborative digital humanities project that created a plain-text-corpus of the Chicano student newspaper El Diario De La Gente. In this essay, my co-author and I use the corpus to test our ability to measure the linguistic similarity between an influential poem and the collection of creative student writing. We use techniques such as Tf-idf, PCA, and POS tagging to understand the dataset.
This project was a custom web-based data visualization for a faculty member's dataset of reported acts of hateful vandalism. The visualization uses Javascript and the D3 library to allow users to interact with the data.
This essay is an example of digital storytelling focused on a 2018 movement in the United States. It considers the scale of protests as a way of understanding theoretical concepts about the relationship between technology and society.