Congratulations to Professor Jaclyn Neel, recipient of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for 2022.
The title of her project is “Rome from the ground up: a social media analysis of Rome’s foundation narrative”.
The project is a fairly universal look at all YouTube videos that retell the story of Romulus and Remus, including the video comments and metadata such as Likes and Views. Its goals are:
(1) to discover any latent social connections between people who post on/comment on YouTube videos on the Roman foundation myth.
(2) to analyze the narratives of these videos and determine what aspects of Rome’s foundation myth are noteworthy to amateurs.
(3) for student videos, to try to identify themes in the retelling of this myth that are common in secondary-school classrooms and map those on to the variety of narratives known from antiquity.