Apparently Undergrad Research is Pretty Nifty

Okay so Bucknell.

I enjoyed people being interested in my project and laughing at my jokes. Above all I have to say I did enjoy the Twitter attention, being quoted and retweeted made me feel like my voice was being heard and my words were taken to heart.

What we had with DSSF was incredibly unique and independent. All the undergraduate research that was presented at BUDSC16 was either in relation to a professor’s work or highly regulated with papers and essays that accompanied their project. We had the opportunity and privilege to conduct truly independent research that was guided by workshops to give us the tools to work with. The opportunity that DSSF gave us was absolutely priceless.

“Tell me all about your project. I want to know all about the Civil War.” One man said while Lauren snorted in the background because she knew what was coming. This man was a speaker that teaches at UMass at Amherst in the Latin American Literature Department. I happen to know another professor that studies Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst, Ilan Stavans who was a mentor to me at the Great Books Summer Program hosted through Amherst College. He had a daughter interested in the Civil War as well and we talked at length about both interest in the Civil War, my time with Dr. Stavans, and my project.

Since my cadets came from everywhere I made connections with a lot of libraries that have something or another on at least one of them. For example: the librarians from Rochester didn’t know that O’Rorke bridge, a prominent bridge in Rochester I’m guessing, was named after my cadet Patrick O’Rorke and that they had papers in their collections from Patrick O’Rorke and from his wife as well and invited me to visit some time. This happened many times over.

The Digital Humanities community is way more open and casual than I expected. I stated in my presentation that in Digital Humanities that I could be judged by my work and not by who I was, even though I got a tweet that disagreed with me I largely found that anyone could do research on anything. However, digital humanities need funds. Yale put together a huge project based on crowd-sourcing and student’s stories that they collected in a view months and Lauren and I were in awe in how they could pull something together that fast and have it be so organized and nice. We quickly were reminded that it was Yale and they had money for DH. Yale quality DH requires funds, time, and tons of manpower. But with that said, DH is still a community of practice. At panels Q&A there were many suggestions of new tools or platforms to use, constructive criticisms and comments that were taken into account. Because new tools are always evolving creating new possibilities for everyone no matter how experienced or inexperienced someone is.

Bucknell was an incredible, yet exhausting, experience that I believe was helpful for all of us and gave us insight to the DH community outside of our little library space.

-Julia