Author:

Abstract:

This article reflects on a central question of the digital humanities: the issues at stake when two disciplines—communication science and computer science—meet to inform each other about their respective conceptual worlds as well as methodologies and tools with a view to advancing communication research. One crucial question is how to turn a communication research question into a digital humanities question. Another question is how to use computer science methods and tools to expand conceptual thinking in communication research. We illustrate our answers to these general questions with a case study and a tool. The case study investigates different communicational roles of microblogging. The TwiNeR tool visualizes large-scale behavioral patterns in the spreading of news through Twitter's live streams across five continents.