ABOUT US
OUR MISSION
The Discord Academic Research Community (affectionally called the D/ARC) is an active and supportive community of over 700 media researchers with interest in understanding Discord’s platform, subcultures, and technology. We started this network because we believe Discord is a critically understudied platform and we really hope to change that! But we can’t do that without established methods , usable tools, and the support of community . The goal of the D/ARC is to kickstart critical investigations into Discord by circulating new tools, monitoring platform changes, and networking scholars.
Grad students, independent scholars, and junior faculty are especially welcome!
Access Community Resources
We have a community-supported Zotero library, documented and tutorialized scrapers and analysis tools, lists of public resources, reading lists, and more!
Stay Informed. Get Involved.
Our community circulates CFPs, tracks Discord updates, and coordinates collaborative research projects. We also host our own events and workshops!
SHARE & DISCUSS YOUR WORK
If you’re actively doing research on Discord, our community will probably want to hear about it! We have channels for you to plug your work and discuss ongoing obstacles.
The D/ARC BLOG
While most of our announcements are made on our Discord server, our mods and occasional guests will sometimes post announcements and thought-pieces to our official blog.
LEADERSHIP TEAM
Our admin team is a transdisciplinary group of junior scholars with research interests in Discord’s culture and social implications. You can find their individual contact information below, or you can contact us in the D/ARC server anytime.
Director, Co-Founder
PS is an incoming Assistant Professor of Experimental Game Design at the University of Alberta. Her research concerns trans game design and toxic technocultures. Their social media work focuses on inter-platform dynamics and their research on Discord explores hate networks and recruitment, and third-party sites / bots. Their work can be found in New Media & Society, Game Studies and more, and they have been interviewed as a subject-expert on Discord by PBS Frontline, The Washington Post, The AP, and others.
Rachel Berryman (she/her)
Director, Co-Founder
Rachel is a doctoral candidate in Internet Studies at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. Her PhD project maps the impact, evolution and industry of the fascinating social media entities known as virtual influencers. A digital culture enthusiast, Rachel’s research on the intersections of social media, intimacy and celebrity can be found in the Journal of Gender Studies, Convergence and Screen.
Daniel Heslep (he/him)
Director, Co-Founder
Daniel is a doctoral student at the University of Central Florida. His research explores Discord and platform ecologies; his work to that end can be found in New Media & Society.
Community Manager
Celeste is a PhD student at the University of Southern California. Her work explores the negotiation of power and intimacy across online communities, and user-interface interaction in relation to digital subcultures. She is particularly interested in these processes as they unfold across celebrity and fandom. Her work can be found in Transformative Works and Cultures, and is forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom.
Community Manager
Kira is a former Assistant Professor of Digital Arts and Sciences and current Research Strategist at the University of Florida. Kira researches “records of play” archived on digital platforms such as Discord and Twitch that serve as documentation of the complex ways players use game play as a creative and expressive modality for rhetorically engaging with identity, culture, history, and politics on both an individual and communal scale. Kira’s work can be found in Popular Culture Studies Journal, ROMChip, Loading…, Widerscreen, Press Start Journal, and others.
Previous Moderators
The D/ARC is exceptionally grateful to our additional co-founders who helped shape this community in its early stages.
Nick-Brie Guarriello (they/she)
Co-Founder
Hibby Thach (they/she)
Co-Founder
f.a.q.
Some quick and crucial info.
If you have a question that isn’t answered below, feel free to use the Contact button above or the form below!
As of now, the D/ARC server has the following restrictions in place:
- New users must be registered on Discord for more than 5 minutes (this helps prevent bot-spam joins and raids).
- New users must view and agree to our community guidelines (this means everyone knows what’s expected).
- By default, new users can only view informational channels (resources, links, and announcements) and cannot post in text chats or join voice discussions. Users can access live discussions by completing a captcha in the
-start-here channel (click the ‘verify’ button). This is to eliminate possible bot-spam, and allow those who just want to lurk and view resources, but not participate or become overwhelmed with notifications, an opportunity to do so.
-start-here That said, we do not verify the affiliations, or off-server information, of newcomers . This is both to maintain the workload of the moderators, and to avoid gatekeeping new members. That said, the community is actively moderated using a three-strike system.
Nothing you are not comfortable with. Members are welcome to introduce themselves (sharing Twitter accounts is fairly standard) and change their nicknames and pronouns for easy interactions. There are optional roles provided for members to identify their current academic status (this is not meant to be hierarchical, and we don’t distinguish things like tenured and untenured faculty) and their academic interests. This is simply to help members easily connect with other folks in the community who share their interests or academic position and is, again, all optional. 🙂
Nope! Our admin team includes folks from all different institutions (or no university at all!). That said, many of us are connected to some of the same organizations, such as the Association of Internet Researchers. We’re hoping to become a more consistent presence at internet research conferences, and we may organize events and workshops for specific conferences, but we’re not affiliated with them in any official way.
We really hope not!
Within the Discord server itself, most of the content posted by admins and our live events will be in English. That said, we’re actively curating resources and research on Discord in every language possible, and hope that D/ARC can be a space for international and cross-lingual collaboration. We’re also happy to create and support language-based channels upon user request.
Check out our quick guide here!