Blog

In my first blog post, my definition of Digital Humanities was “TBA”. To be completely honest, I did not fully understand or comprehend the weight that Digital Humanities would have on my life and how much of an integral part it would have in my future academic studies.

To redefine Digital Humanities now, I would like to start out with a definition of Humanities from Standford.

“The humanities can be described as the study of how people process and document the human experience.”

Digital Humanities is a new birth of Humanities, trying to be freed from the formal “academics only” stigma of traditional Humanities. What comes to my mind when I think of a comparison of Digital Humanities is Star Trek. It is a new field, there is so much to explore and create but we aren’t doing it to conquer, but to explore and add to the wealth of knowledge that is already out there. We are not creating a new world, we are just adding to parts of the old one. The core of Digital Humanities is still the same; to explore what makes us human and what connects us to each other. But the way that we are approaching it is different and our values are different as well.

To compare to Star Trek once again, the difference of traditional Humanities and Digital Humanities are like the differing goals of exploration for the Age of Exploration in the 16th century and Star Trek Exploration in the 23rd century. Like the goals of Exploration in the 16th century were things like: spread of religion, to attain wealth and exotic riches, and to spread imperial power. These are also true of what you can say of traditional Humanities because they have been around since the Age of Exploration and even before that. The goals of 23rd century exploration are: “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before”. Exploration while embracing the diversity that has been brought to the forefront of Humanities.

“Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms.”
-Gene Roddenberry

I believe we have reached that point to where we not only praise diversity but when diversity is lacking we call it out and address it, especially in the field of Digital Humanities. One of the core values of Digital Humanities is diversity, not only in subject matter, but in people. Part of diversity is accessibility. Traditional humanities has the stigma of old white men because for centuries only old white men formally studied humanities, it was only accessible to them. One of the values of Digital Humanities that I find very important and very inspiring about Digital Humanities is the importance placed on accessibility and how anyone can access and anyone can do Digital Humanities.

Through this fellowship I have learned that Digital Humanities is not “TBA”, it is a defined field of diversity and exploration into what connects us as humans and how we can make that accessible to everyone, not just Humanists or Digital Humanists.

Kirk out.

So it’s the end of the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship 2016. This is a very bitter sweet movement; I am both happy and incredibly sad. I am happy to be going home to air conditioning but I am sad to be leaving behind such wonderful and incredible people I have bonded with over the past 10 weeks. Although it is the end of the summer, I would like to think that it is just the end of the beginning. The fellows and I have already established that fact that we fully intend to come back in the fall. We have already started to make jokes about using the Keurig in the staff room and visiting R C in his new office.

But more than that, our projects are going to live on after this summer. That’s the beauty of digital humanities. It is simply just not one and done, it is an ongoing process. I am going to continue expanding my project as well as starting new ones. From what I and the cohort have learned and accomplished over the summer, it is safe to say that digital humanities is here to stay.

So this is not the end, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful fellowship.

-Keira

P.S. Do you get the movie references?

If you think Digital Humanities is exclusive lemme tell you about being a woman in Military History and more narrowly, a woman pursuing Military Theory. There are very few women military writers, most of them write about having spouses in the military, the home-front, or affairs with generals. Let’s narrow down the field a bit more to women that write about military history, and even then we don’t talk about hard military tactics (unless you’re Jennifer Murray, I love you and your work and you inspire me every day). Now let’s narrow it EVEN FARTHER into women that study military theory. Me. Now let me say that again for y’all in the back: THERE ARE NO PROMINENT WOMEN MILITARY THEORISTS. You have people like Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, and Jomini.

What I am doing, while not “hard” military theory like artillery and weapon movements and troop formations, it shows the social side of war. Because we often forget that war, as Clausewitz so famously puts it “War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale”. It is organized murder for a cause of a government or non-governmental organization. This affects the human psyche in so many ways as expanded upon in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Dave Grossman (which has honestly changed my life and my outlook of warfare).

These young men, barely out of their teenage years were thrust into a war against their own countrymen to fight for the future of a nation, North or South.

This project is different, it is revolutionary in the sense that it deals with an aspect of war that is not discussed often. It is revolutionary in the way that it is a resource on military history that is interactive and open to the public free of charge and free of any elitist military vocabulary. It is revolutionary in the way that it is done by a 19 year-old female civilian.

The field of military history is changing with West Point leading the charge by digitizing their textbook, which is basically just a huge digital project now. It gives the experience that users did not have before such as 3-D models of guns, ships, and other weaponry, interactive battle maps, etc. While my project does not have all those fancy thingamajigs, it does have interactive elements to be more hands-on with the knowledge. It has visualizations to better display the information. I have videos and wikipedia pages and links to other pages of information on every battle so that even those who do not know what happened at the battle of Gettysburg can learn more not only about the battle, but about the men who fought in it.

I want people who would not usually be interested in the Civil War or in military history to look at this project and not only understand what happened to the cadets, but to feel for them. And also to show that anyone can do military history.

-Julia

 

Elevator speeches are a problem for me, because when I get passionate I just start talking really fast and can go on and on until someone finally tells me to shut up. This makes elevator speeches problematic since they need to get the point across in around a minute. To fit all of my research and all of this program into a minute or less is an art form that I have not quite perfected yet, but well on my way to working on it.

I suppose it would start with a greeting like “Hi, my name is Julia Wall.” And maybe if the person I was talking to did not know me “I am a sophomore at Gettysburg College.” And maybe, if I had time, I would say my major and minor. But I think that’s getting a bit ahead of myself.

“Hi my name is Julia Wall, I am a history major, Civil War Era Studies minor at Gettysburg college. This summer I have been working in my college’s library on a digital humanities project, basically a more interactive digital form of humanities. My project is about the West Point Class of June 1861 and their involvement in the Civil War. I am basing my research off of a yearbook of one of the cadets in Special Collections and researching what happened to each cadet based on West Point cadet registers, the War of Rebellion Records, and the cadet’s annotations in the yearbook. I have an interactive timeline for each cadet and an interactive map that shows where each cadet went during the course of the Civil War. My project is all about the relationships that all these cadets formed at West Point, I am visualizing their journey and their lives.

Well since I am very proud of my project I would want to and am going to share it with everyone. Basically for months after this project and when everyone asks me about how my summer was and how I spent my summer I will go into my elevator speech and try to convey the importance of my project and of Digital Humanities/Scholarship. I have already practiced my elevator speech many times over, not just in the library or to school faculty, but just to people in town. I love these cadets and I am so passionate about this project that I don’t think I could shut up about it.

An audience that would probably be interested in my project and research would be the Civil War community. People that I would talk to from the Civil War community would probably have more interest and more questions about my research and findings so I would probably get more time to talk about what I have done. I would also probably personalize it and relate it to John Bachelder’s history of the battle of Gettysburg. Because it was basically just a compilation of reports right now, my next step in the project is to personalize it and make conclusions, but for now it is what it is and I will try to keep it at 2 minutes or less.

-Julia

 

For the past few weeks of the fellowship, our cohort has been very focused on coworking. When the library is open, we sit together at a table on the second floor, surrounded by windows. After hours, we move to a basement room in Glatfelter.
This style of working has a number of benefits. Personally, it has been one of the most prominent ways I have experienced the communal nature of the digital humanities. When we work together, we are in support of one another, have the opportunity to bounce ideas off of each other, and, perhaps most notably, can vent about the frustrations we feel towards our projects. Coworking also helps to keep us motivated. Our individual feelings of determination feed into one another so that our workplace is focused.
All of this being said, sharing a workspace also leads to a lot of stress relief. While we realize and value the importance of working hard, we also know that we have to stay positive and not burn ourselves out. The best work happens when we approach our task enthusiastically and with support.

Throughout the summer the fellows and working group have often discussed the values of digital humanities. One value that we always come back to is collaboration. This summer has really been a summer of collaboration. I could not imagine this summer without working together. I feel that if this summer was structured as an independent research fellowship, I would have not have learned as much as I have. If I was told find some tools to work with and create a project, I would only look for tools that fit my vision for my site. I would not have stopped to explore anything outside of my own project.

From what we have discussed over the summer, I have learned that digital humanities is a community. I have explored new ways of displaying data and research in a digital form because of our digital community. The workshops and sessions I felt were based on group involvement. For some sessions, we had to look up different projects or research a specific tool and present our findings to the cohort. This alone fostered an environment of collaboration. Some of the projects and tools Lauren and Julia found, I would not have found on my own. These small presentations allowed us to work on our presentation skills as well as exchange information about different tools and projects.

I also found that the lunch meetings greatly helped form our own digital humanities community. We were able to connect with one another as well as our mentors and advisers. We were open to research help and advice and I believe that the working group truly helped us all form and shape our digital projects. We understood that we could not do this alone and that we needed help. Most of us did not really know what digital humanities was or what went into building a digital project.

Lastly, the fellows have created a strong bond over the summer. This bond is both academic and personal. We were able to listen to each other’s research, projects, thoughts, opinions, jokes, and memes. We were able to ask one another for advice on the direction our project, our research, and the look of our website. Lastly, we were able to help one another in almost every aspect a colleague and friend could.  We were there for Julia when she cried over the fact the Alonzo may have been killed by his best friend. Julia and I listened to Lauren’s frustration over the fact that Gettysburg students were not really involved in a lot of social movements. Lauren and Julia were there for me when I couldn’t figure out Scalar.

This sense of community does not only apply to our own fellowship. This applies to the entire digital humanities community. I remember R.C telling us that twitter was a great way to communicate with other members of the digital humanities community. If you have a question, all you have to do is send a tweet to the DH community and see who responds. We were also able to work with the students from Lafayette College in many aspects of our projects.

The idea of digital humanities as being a community informs us that its not just a community for those who have the privilege to be a part of it. Instead, it tells us that digital humanities is a community in which anyone who chooses to, can be a part of. To create a digital project you need the people who can code, the people who can research, and the people who can design to work together to create something unique. I believe that we have created something unique over the summer with one another and the digital humanities community.

In a small town in Slovenia, Ana Ros co-owns a world-renown restaurant with her husband. While discussing her success as a chef, she stated that, “when one is loved, she can create better.” As a Digital Scholarship Summer Fellow, I experienced this type of productive love by being a member of the Digital Humanities community of practice.

A community of practice is a group of people in a profession who are oriented towards a similar goal. The similarities that tie the people to one another create a support system within the group itself and encourage the further development of the digital humanities. The DSSF working group taught me that this support system is rooted in trust–I trust that the working group, my fellows, and the larger DH community will critique, guide, inform and inspire my work as they have done in the past.

Had I entered the program and been left to my own devices, I (and my project) would have been misguided and dysfunctional. The only person I could have had trust in was  myself, which would have been terrifying and impossible because I didn’t have any experience in the field of digital humanities and hardly any in the realm of technology. In our very first week of the fellowship, we were introduced to the definition of DH through various pieces of dialogue and critique. Examining and discussing multiple people’s opinions proved that the only way to truly carry out the digital humanities was to become immersed in the community of practice.

Connecting with various members of the DH community this summer emphasized to me that projects are driven by passion. Consequently, people apply the same passion to the DH field more generally and help build the foundation of trust by sharing, working on, and analysing other people’s work. By devoting the same level of enthusiasm to another person’s project that one would devote to their own, the community of practice makes clear that they are devoted continuing the development of DH and spreading it to various communities.
The idea that DH is a community of practice implies that it is self reliant. The main support for the field comes from within, rather than from exterior or corporate entities. This gives members of the community greater autonomy and the possibility for new and innovative ways of creativity and learning. The community is made up of a mosaic of people, who each have the opportunity to contribute their own work and ideas to advance and promote DH.

When looking at possible data sets for my research I could almost laugh. My research project is incredibly data-heavy and keeps being added to. I could do a data set about how class rank affected military rank in the class, or how far each cadet traveled, there are so many possibilities it is absolutely insane.

I actually have a data set that I am including in my project and it is the battles of the civil war that the cadets were in and how many cadets were in each battle/expedition/arsenal/etc. I believe that this data set can be best displayed through a map which I am working on through StoryMapJS.

I have already made many spreadsheets of this and also a couple of test maps, they have been updated continuously because there is always research and battles that I somehow missed the previous time. I went from 75 locations to 153 in the span of a couple of weeks, and even them some minor skirmishes and battles might be missing.

I like the layout and display of StoryMapJS and how you can add media to locations. There is one great problem however, you can only add slides in order. So say I missed a location on the previous data set, I can’t just go in and add in a location between slides, which is a problem when I have over 150 locations.

And if we really want to talk about data sets, my project is basically a giant mass of data sets. For every cadet I am doing a timeline. My timelines take the data of where each cadet went during the Civil War and what happened to him, including arsenals they stayed at, battles they fought, expeditions they went on, and other events in their lives such as marriages and death. I will also include what other cadets were in shared engagements, adding more data to an already dataful data set. I am doing this for all 38 cadets.

Not only am I doing a map and individual timelines, I am also compiling records from The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. I am not compiling all the records, but good lord it certainly feels like it. I am going through all 83 copies of The War of the Rebellion and finding the records about all my cadets. Every report, order of battle, casualty list, even every mention of each cadet will eventually be put on the page as well. The data set with this has to do with the books themselves and how many mentions each cadet has in companion to the timeline data set of where each cadet has been. 

Now, I have a great deal of data. I could not possibly need or want any more, right?

WRONG.

I could do so much more!

Not only could I do this for the class of June 1861, I could compile one for the May class as well.

I could do this for every West Point class that had cadets that served in the Civil War! It would be around 30 classes, with hundreds upon hundreds of cadets. So I should be lucky that I am starting so small, but it could be worse.

-Julia

 

I can honestly say that before this fellowship, I was a technophobe. I disliked technology with a strong passion. I always preferred doing things the “old fashioned way” (this could have been a sign that I was a budding historian or that I was a pretentious hipster). I prided myself on the fact that I didn’t know how to use social media but I knew how to work a 1960s Polaroid camera. Our discussion on Monday about how we use and view digital tools made me think about my own hesitations towards anything digital.

The discussion on Monday was accurate in pinpointing the reasons why some students are still uncomfortable with using technology in an academic setting. From personal experience, my technophobia stems from what I was taught in elementary school and high school. I can still remember having to go to the library to do a research project. When the internet started to become more widely used, I was taught that the internet was an unreliable source. (Who has gotten the Wikipedia spiel?) This trend continued throughout my middle school career until the message “the internet is unreliable” was embedded in my mind.

When I came to Gettysburg I fell into my routine of only using books. I found myself struggling to use the online resources for research because I didn’t know how to navigate the online resources. Even though I was brought up in a very digital world, the people who are/were my teachers were not and still stick to the traditional learning methods. I don’t think there is anything wrong with sticking to the traditional methods of teaching, however, I think it is important to show that digital sources can assist us in the classroom. This summer I have learned about the benefits technology brings to academia and I can say I am no longer a technophobe. If the digital humanities community wants to continue, we must encourage students to explore the depths of technology.

Last week, we discussed “elevator speeches”, which contain introductions to a person’s project and appeals for people to be involved–all in 30 seconds or less. The goal is that the information contained in the speech is compelling and clear so that the listener is intrigued and not confused.

The sample speech that I’ll write below is meant for a student or alumni audience. As I’ve continued to do work on my project, I’ve realized that I will need to appeal to current students and alums to build on the research I’ve done this summer.  Without further ado, here is one version of my elevator speech.

“Hey guys, my name is Lauren White, and I have been researching and learning about digital tools this summer as a Digital Scholarship Summer Fellow in Musselman Library. Based on what I’ve learned about digital scholarship, I have created an interactive website using Scalar and Timeline JS. By using these kinds of digital tools, we can make the humanities more public facing and inviting.

Specifically, my project places instances of social justice at Gettysburg from 1980-1990 on a digital timeline. I hope to expand the date range in the coming school year. Many of you have supported my involvement in this project, thank you so much for doing so! I’d love to collect more stories to build on my project. In order for this to happen, I hope you’ll share your experiences and tell others about the timeline. By doing this, we can document and encourage student activism at the college.

I know that this is a lot of information. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask!