On Friday, the Digital Summer Scholars had the pleasure of visiting other digital scholars at Lafayette College. The visit was both fun and educational. It was interesting to hear about the projects the Lafayette students were working on. One thing that surprised me was the diversity in Lafayette’s digital projects. Since all of our projects heavily revolve around history and Special Collections, I forgot that there are a number of other disciplines that use digital humanities as a way to present research. A couple projects had more of a social science feel to them and unlocked the political science and public policy view of digital humanities. One project revolved around music and creating a synthesizer interactive timeline. The diversity in these projects allowed me to really grasp the concept that digital humanities covers a wide variety of disciplines, not just history. I saw myself involuntarily collaborating and learning from these people I had known for only a couple hours through our discussions, activities, and twitter (this was the first encounter I have ever had with twitter). Overall, I learned things on this trip that I may have not encountered otherwise. I look forward to seeing these students again with their finished projects. I know they will be great!
There’s somewhat of a debate as to what to call DH/DS and what it all encompasses … Lafayette calls their program Digital Humanities, but are very interdisciplinary. We call ours Digital Scholarship, but we are more humanities focused …