Adair Rounthwaite is Associate Professor and Chair of the Division of Art History. She is a specialist in contemporary art, and her most recent book is This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb (University of Minnesota Press, 2024).

As a Digital Humanities Summer Fellow, Rounthwaite will work with a student assistant on a dataset of tweets with tags potentially pertaining to the alt-right meme Pepe the Frog, from the period before and after the January 6, 2021 riot on the US Capitol. While current tools allow users to search tweets based on textual metadata and to select for those which have images attached, it is not possible to search for certain images based on their content. They will add another layer of metadata that indicates the content of images and also their emotional tone, in order to study the circulation and variations of the meme and the kinds of affect it stimulated. This will enable a more nuanced analysis of the changing visual landscape of alt-right social media and of its relationship to the live event of the riot.