Category: Reflective Post 1

The definition of Digital Humanities (DH) by AI states DH as “an interdisciplinary field that integrates computational tools and methods with traditional humanities disciplines”.

As an international student, the word humanity is scary. Coming from a STEM-driven family, for the majority of my life I was indoctrinated to believe that the humanities are merely for appreciation, to make me look cultured at the dinner table. Developing any sort of humanistic work would sentence me to a life of unfulfillment and financial instability. 

Mathematical Economics was my compromise. I have always been fascinated by statistics and data analysis, and it sounds mouthful enough to satisfy the STEM freaks that I call family. I was fortunate enough to fall in love with the field, but I always had a true passion: policy & politics. 

My best, most honest, and raw work was produced in the context of policy. Watching the complicated balance between people, power, processes, society, and beliefs evolve with the rise of new technology fuels me to constantly learn and stay updated on what is happening in my surroundings, locally, regionally, and even globally. 

This first week felt like a deja vu of my Introduction to Public Policy class in a very particular way. Thinking about UX Design immediately transported me to my class about stakeholder analysis and adapting to different needs and expectations; project management made me think about policy implementation; even our introductory section, about failure, collaboration, building castles and logs sounded familiar. 

The common trait between policy and DH is people. Is made by people, for people. Regardless of whether it is a computer or a bill in between, my view of the Digital Humanities is extremely rooted in people. Just as policymaking, DH is born from a need. The need for accessibility of information in a digital era. I could send 1000 thesis to my grandmother in Senegal, she would probably not get past line 3, but sending her a link with a map, videos, and pictures would resonate with her, even though she does not speak a word of English.

DH becomes a language itself, challenging me to display knowledge in different, more creative ways. Reflecting upon my project itself, bringing a Digital Humanities context to electoral policy allowed me to view the same events from angles that I did not even know existed. I was able to draw connections between policies in different countries, and their effect on the democratic process, even creating my own metadata with symbols on a whiteboard. 

In the following weeks, I look forward to expanding my own interpretations of Digital Humanities, thinking more about how the values of DH apply to not only my project but also my experience as a fellow. I hope that through openness, collaboration, and experimentation I am able to encompass a wider range of perspectives and stories, using different forms of data visualization to craft narratives that highlight the human stories behind the headlines. 

While my STEM-driven family fostered in me a respect for data, analysis, and empirical rigor, DH is an opportunity to expand my perspectives, showing the value of human-centered approaches to technology and information.

Both our introductory workshop as well as Dr. Amanda Visconti’s piece emphasized the complexity in identifying what makes a project something that falls under digital humanities. The key components, however, come down to an openness of the project to use digital tools in order to facilitate humanistic research. As we have discussed in class, such openness comes from several different angles. Not only must a project be accessible to the public, but it also must be open to feedback and critique. Visconti builds on this idea even more, using Document the Now and the Infinite Ulysses digital edition as digital humanities projects that build a community around the project, revealing both steps to their processes and setting up ways for their audience to communicate both with them as well as each other. As Visconti says, she values Digital Humanities for valuing interdisciplinarity and her connectedness to the community.  

My DH tries to build on that same level of openness to the community through its collaboration. Gettysburg College’s Digital Humanities Fellowship is teaching me how to use digital tools effectively and giving me the space to complete my project, but there is no way I would have been able to pursue my project as effectively without the work that Dickinson College has done with the LGBT Center of Central Pennsylvania. Their work in documenting and digitizing the stories of LGBT people throughout the local area has been critical to spreading their stories, and my research is simply building upon those stories and boiling them down into a format that is easier to access.

My DH is also experimental in terms of what I will accomplish on a personal level. While I’m not treading any new ground in terms of digital tools, they are nonetheless very new. Visconti and everyone else involved in Digital Humanities has emphasized the importance of failure and trying new things. Learning digital tools and opening myself up to website design and data visualization is a whole new world, and DH has welcomed me into the fold eagerly.

Visconti’s piece has not changed much of what I learned throughout the first week, especially the first workshop. Instead, it has built upon the ideas of connection and collaboration that we agreed upon in our workshop and applied it further. She celebrates the idea that digital humanists value “a variety of skills and professional roles,” noting that all scholars are credited. While the space is not completely perfect, the attitude towards community and collaboration is something I value as well in my DH.

As Visconti has said in the beginning of her piece, my DH is rooted in the humanities both as a primary source and as a mode of inquiry. One of my central questions I will ask throughout my research is simply, “How are the language and tone shifting in each article?” Journalists are human, and they have their own biases. Part of my project involves analyzing where this bias will shine through and possibly discovering patterns between my sources.

My DH will be an effort in collaborating with both the local community and other people within the Digital Humanities Fellowship to perform humanistic research and learn digital tools along the way.

For me, DH represents an encapsulation of man made items to create and collaborate with other cultures in order to document and preserve humanity’s creations. Let’s elaborate on this. DH allows for collaboration to places and people previously thought to be inaccessible. This is due to the “Digital” part of Digital Humanities. This new era of digitizing has given people a widespread reach not only to communicate but also to understand ideas and give answers that were only available to academics or independent cultures at one time or another. This reach can then lead to a group of people from different backgrounds to come together and create new projects in order to document and preserve these older ideas and answers with newer technologies. However, DH does not just represent older areas. New ideas for DH are being come up with every day which helps to have an ever evolving meaning and purpose for DH. It is important to recognize the ephemeral nature of DH as this is at its very core. DH in and of itself is a very new subject only created within the past few decades with the expanse of the Internet.

A curious question that has arisen for me is what discipline DH would be posed under, or is it now it’s own separate field? For me, DH reads as a subfield of Cultural Anthropology. Now, do I realise that this would give me a lot of heat just by others in Gettysburg’s Anthropology department? Absolutely. But let’s look at the similarities. The purpose of Cultural Anthropology according to Britannica is, “the study of culture in all of its aspects and that uses the methods, concepts, and data of archaeology, ethnography and ethnology, folklore, and linguistics in its descriptions and analyses of the diverse peoples of the world.” While this definition does not encapsulate everything both DH and Cultural Anthropology does, many similarities can be drawn between the two. They both study culture in some way along with using very similar methods and concepts with a combination of linguistics that combines the diverse peoples around the world. To me, this is the easiest way to understand DH as it combines a field that I am familiar with while also expounding upon and bringing that subject further into the digital. Again, I do recognise these are slightly fighting words, but DH seems to have a different meaning and classification for everyone, so what does DH actually stand for? I don’t think there will ever be one solid answer to this question.

DH, like the Internet, is going to constantly evolve and become more prevalent as the Digital Age continues. This can be a very good thing if used wisely, but like all things on the Internet that has to be said with a grain of salt. That being said, I am excited to see where DH ends up and expect to help be a part of that evolution even in the small time I am working in the field.