Friday, May 4, 2018:Â
During the 2017-2018 academic year, my Flash Fellowship project for the Digital Writing and Research Lab at UT Austin was to examine the rhetorical construction of the concept âbotsâ as a political cultural artifact over the paperâs history with specific attention to the politicization of âthe botâ in discourse preceding and following the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. First, I archived every article published in The New York Times containing the term âbotâ on a single digital platform and manually input relevant metadata (article column, date, online only vs print, etc). Then, using the text-mining tool Overviewdocs, I identified chronological patterns in the termâs changing definitions, context, and frequency of use.Â
 Credit to funding by the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. www.dwrl.utexas.edu
