Researcher

+ Last updated in December, 2023 +

Travis' research portfolio follows an interdisciplinary approach in blending principles of brand management and multimedia design with academic research into digital voice. His overarching focus links digital voice at the micro level to capital relationships at higher levels. Such scholarship is unusual in contributing to knowledge on the digital voices of varied participants, ranging from under-resourced teenagers and Media Studies students in South Africa, to its local celebrities and dissident health professionals.

Another rare focus is Travis' concern for the visibility risks associated with digital voice. He has written about how scientists use digital voice to work around formal suppression, but then must negotiate online academic bullying from supporters of The Science™. Travis' focus on scientific suppression and the value of dissent is vital in a period where health authoritarians strive to exercise narrative control and censorship of failed products and policies. Notably, the official COVID-19 response's serious social harms.

Travis' research has also made novel methodological contributions with regards to analysing digital voice on microblogging platforms. Notably, by providing a rationale for exploring how qualitative methods can be applied to small data regarding micro-bloggers' communications about science articles. He has also described how contrasting functionalities of qualitative data analysis software packages can impact the analysis of live microblogging data.

Through The Noakes Foundation's Fake Celebrity Endorsement (FCE) research project, Travis has also contributed knowledge about this digital crime, and local celebrities' cybervictimisation experiences. FCE has also raised public awareness via reportfakeendorsement.com.

+CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

View ongoing and planned research avenues, follow @travisnoakes' tweets, this blog, or check out

The Noakes Foundation's Lab for Questioning the Science™ on ResearchGate.

++Academic Free Speech and Digital Voices (AFSDV)

Travis leads the Academic Fress Speech and Digital Voices research project (AFSDV). Its foci resonate with his: research profile's interests, past scholarship and best contributions.

++ PUBLICATIONS

His best outputs and completed research have led to these peer-reviewed research articles, conference papers and chapters. Where copyright permits, their manuscripts are shared from his Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive accounts.

++ RESEARCH PROFILES
Travis Noakes' scholarly publications are indexed by ORCID, Web of Science, SCOPUS, Semantic Scholar, Kudos and Google Scholar. New publications are shared via two academic social networks; Academia.edu and ResearchGate. Public presentations can be viewed at Slideshare.

++ RESEARCH GROUPS
Travis is a member of four international organisations: the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), the Data Visualization Society, The Knobel Network, The Independent Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE), and the Data Visualization Society (DVS). Locally, he’s a member of the Design Education Forum of Southern Africa (DEFSA), the South African Multimodality in Education research group (SAME, UCT) and the South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists (SAICSIT). At CPUT, he remains in the WhatsApp groups of Professor Johannes Cronje's Technology in Education Research Postgraduate Students group (TERPS) and the Design Research Activities Workgroup (DRAW)'s.

++ REVIEWS
Travis does reviews for journals and conferences, and assists postgraduate students with improving their research project designs and academic writing style. Travis also reviews book proposals for publication decision.

At the request of the South African National Research Foundation, Travis did a research rating appraisal that covered a scholar's application for a re-rating based on eight years (2014-2021) of his work.

X RESEARCH & DESIGN PROJECTS

xx Online academic bullying (OAB) (2019+)
As a Post-doctoral research fellow at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Travis explored how academic cyberbullies used digital media for launching new forms of intellectual harassment. This supported the Online Academic Bullying theme. This became an AFSDV research focus under its Digital Visibility Risks theme.

xx Shushmoji anti-harassment chat sticker sets and booklet (2019+)

Travis' company, Create With™ Cape Town, has launched the Shushmoji ® chat sticker app for WhatsApp on Android, and Apple. These stickers can be used as conversation enders, one of many possible strategies against cyber harassment. Travis also wrote its anti-chat harassment tactics booklet for antibullying educators and potential victims.

xxMultimodal argument in data visualisation (2017/22)
Associate Professor Arlene Archer and Travis researched multimodal argument in data visualisation infographics based on fieldwork (2017-18) at the Centre for Film and Media Studies, UCT.

xxInequality in Digital Personas (2009/18)

Travis' PhD thesis is available on Open UCT. Its work was supported by South Africa’s National Research Fund, which provided funding as part of its ‘Procedural literacy, digital media and curriculum’ grant.

xxMedia, Conflict and Democratisation (2015/16)

Travis developed a coding index that was used by MeCoDEM's international team of researchers for coding interviews with social activists and journalists from Egypt, Kenya, Serbia and South Africa.

xxStudent ICT Access and Use (2011/13)

Travis prepared ICT Access and Use's first and second cycle coding schemas after transcribing many student interviews.