In the first few weeks of the semester, I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Kay Etheridge on a wordpress blog for her comparative physiology class. I loved the premise–she wanted to use the blog as a tool to teach her class how to write about comparative physiology and science in general for general audiences with varying levels of scientific understanding. To me, this project was a great example of how the digital humanities are not limited to traditional humanities materials–they can include STEM fields as well. Creating an open facing blog meant to pique the interest of and educate a broad array of people about relevant science is just as much a part of the digital humanities as a timeline of student social justice movements.
Most rewarding though has been seeing the fulfillment of our summer plans. For the duration of the summer, we talked about how beneficial the digital humanities could be for classrooms, but it was often in a very hypothetical sense. Our blog posts talked about what potential DH could have in a classroom if a student or professor decided to use it in their scholarship. To see the actual positive implementation of digital tools and a digital humanities frame of thinking in a classroom setting has been extremely rewarding. It’s also been rewarding to have people come to us with project proposals and questions because it shows that knowledge of the digital humanities at Gettysburg is spreading.
One thing that makes digital scholarship blogs different from traditional classroom projects is that they are inevitable more public facing and as such interact with copyright and copyright laws more directly. Conveying this to both students and professors, and helping them to understand their own rights and responsibilities as creators, has been a challenge.
My sense has been that many students and professors think that the cost and energy investment of learning how to use digital tools outweighs the benefits. We, as students, act as examples of people who put in the time to use digital tools to give form to our passions, and we have more than reaped the benefits. That being said, we can also apply our own experience as students to alter the scope of a project, and plan something that is feasible for a classroom project. Also, dialogue between students helps to increase the diversity of projects and how they’re presented because it encourages more creativity in its implementation than a straightforward paper would.
