On Monday, March 2nd, folks from the WRD department came together in person and through Zoom for the Winter Student Research Showcase. At this event, WRD students Brittany Griffiths and Amber Corkey gave us the inside scoop on what they’ve been researching during their time at DePaul. They also discussed the process of funding, planning, and executing research projects as a student.
From Proposal to Conference: A Case Study in Undergraduate Research
Brittany Griffiths is the senior manager of operations at Brown Books Publishing Group. She graduated last autumn, after earning her BA in WRD as a fully online student living in Texas. Her research focuses on hybrid publishing: an alternative option to the more well-known options of traditional and independent publishing. It requires authors to invest more at the outset, but it lets authors keep a higher amount of the proceeds than a traditional publisher would.
In her research project, supported by a Summer Undergraduate Research Grant (SURG) in 2025, Brittany performed a rhetorical analysis aimed at determining how this publishing method is perceived by different people in the publishing industry, and why those perceptions exist. Through qualitative interviews with industry professionals and a digital ethnography of spaces where authors and publishers are connecting (like Reddit and Instagram), Brittany found that traditional publishers do not seem to view hybrid publishing negatively, but that authors often do.
Safety Tools in TTRPGs: A Pilot Study
Amber Corkey is a grad student in the MAWRD program with years of experience playing and organizing games in the tabletop roleplaying (TTRPG) community. Their research began as an independent study this quarter. TTRPGs, such as Dungeons & Dragons, include a lot of collaborative storytelling, so the social aspect of these games is key. They rely on human interaction and connection, which means there’s potential for harm just like with any other emotionally vulnerable human relationship.
Amber’s ongoing research is an investigation into how people who play TTRPGs use tools to ensure the mental and emotional wellbeing of their players, and what kinds of tools are available to them. The ones they’ve identified so far include strategies like having a “session 0,” where players gather to bond and set norms before starting the game.
Research Funding and Logistics
For Brittany, the research process took about six months from the initial planning of the SURG funding application to writing the final report. Amber’s project is only 9 weeks along, but they’ve already done the initial background research and begun interviewing. They plan to do interviews and collect a good amount of data over the upcoming summer, and the full process could take a year or two.
Both speakers talked about the importance of getting approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) for their projects right away. The process was one of the more time-consuming steps, but it’s an important part of making sure the research is ethical and transparent.
Methods
Both projects relied heavily on qualitative interviews, so Brittany and Amber shared their strategies, as well as some of the insights they gained about interviewing. Amber highlighted the importance of asking the right questions and using the right terminology: for example, though their study was focused on safety tools, they avoided using that term while interviewing. One of their goals was to discover all strategies that their interviewees might be using, so they had to avoid leading the interviewees in a particular direction.
Brittany also touched on the desire to avoid steering her interviewees. Additionally, she talked about the importance of using spreadsheets and other organizational methods, as she carried out 38 interviews in total. Analyzing the data involved coding and theming, something she’d had experience in previously, but not at this scale.
Opportunities for transfer
These research projects are not confined to the world of academia. Brittany says that her research has been great way to expand her professional network. She was able to speak to and engage with industry professionals during the research process. After the project was complete, she presented her findings at a conference at George Washington University last October, and she’s adapted and submitted other parts of it to several upcoming conferences as well.
The applications of Amber’s research go beyond the gaming table, too. Since these safety tools are, at their core, a way to ensure that people’s boundaries are respected and that group sessions go smoothly, these strategies could be implemented in any environment that relies heavily on teamwork. This includes other forms of gaming, and more broadly, environments like the workplace.
Conclusion
Thank you to Brittany and Amber for sharing your work with us, and for showing us what it’s like to do research as a student—we can’t wait to see where it takes you in the future.
To all other students, we hope to see you and your own research at future student showcases!