The Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference proved to be a great experience for all. The digital scholars were able to meet a lot of great people and learn more about the community of digital scholarship. Reflecting back on my experience, I really enjoyed being able to interact with other digital scholars. Since I am new to digital scholarship, it was nice to be able to talk with people about their experiences with digital tools and workshops. I also enjoyed many of the presentations I went to. It was nice to see other undergraduate students engaging with digital scholarship, creating these impressive and diverse projects. One presentation about digital storytelling as a tool to preserve the history of the Williamsport Black Community made me want to do a similar project at Gettysburg College. Other projects included a neat Art History archive that three Bucknell students created and an interesting History Harvest project at Susquehanna University. And it was nice see the Lafayette Digital Scholars again.
I made a couple interesting connections. N. C. Christopher Couchgave a presentation about the circulation and use of Indigenous language texts in New England. Being interested in Indigenous studies I decided to go to his presentation to see what he was doing. It turns out that the project is in its early stages of planning but after the presentation I went up to him and had a nice discussion about his project. I told in about my interest in Native American Studies and he was able to give me more information about what he is planning to do with his project and the Indigenous scholars he is planning on contacting. He gave me his card and told me to update him on my career plans.
What was probably my favorite thing about this conference is the twitter feed. I have never been so popular on twitter before this conference. It was really interesting to see people tweeting about our presentation and quoting us. All the positive tweets about presentations and panel discussion really allowed me to see that digital humanities is a community of practice. The cohort discussed this value of DH throughout the summer but I was able to really see it at the conference. Everyone was so supportive and enthusiastic about our projects and other presenter’s projects. Even before my presentation on women saw how nervous I was and told me that I was “among a community of friends” and was going to do a great job. We were getting continuous complements throughout the day and were mobbed during our poster presentations. The presentations themselves focused on diversity and inclusion. The keynote speakers all focused their speeches around how to diversify the DH community and many other presentations were about how DH includes many different voices.
Overall, I am glad that I was able to go to digital conference and present. It was a great experience and I learned a lot about digital humanities and the community of DH.
Glad you could see first-hand how important Twitter is at these sorts of conferences! Glad you could make some connections to other scholars.