We had a great first week with the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows! I am impressed with Julia, Keira, and Lauren’s enthusiasm and energy, and the way they have dived headlong into this experiment in student learning and digital scholarship. They took over their group space, and even started doing some crowd-sourced research on the aesthetic properties of Civil War cadets.
Something we talked about a bit this week was the idea of failure in digital scholarship, which Anne Burdick, et. al, speak to in Digital_Humanities:
Digital Humanities must have, and even encourages, failures . Outside the normative core, there is space to iterate and test, to create precarious experiments that are speculative, ludic, or even impossible. That research can benefit from failure should not be any sort of surprise—stress-testing metals and other materials is what gives us bridges that don’t collapse and buildings that stay up—but so too can the classroom digital_humanities 22 benefit from an academic culture that welcomes frequent (productive) failure. The methodologies of Digital Humanities are robust precisely because they place lasting pedagogical value in the creative, generative, and experimental processes of design-based research. Process is favored over product; versioning and extensibility are favored over definitive editions and research silos. The Digital Humanities capacity to ask, design, and model new research questions opens new possibilities for those who are willing to take risks. Too often in established cultural discourse, the experimental is absent or hastily erased, the dialogue already so well-established that new approaches are incremental at best. But it is not an experiment if it cannot fail (21-22).
This summer is an experiment, a pilot, a way for us to see if we can find a new way to engage students at Gettysburg College. We don’t have all the answers, and sometimes what we do just won’t work. Failure will happen, simply because we haven’t stress-tested this idea in production. But that’s ok; if we learn from it, if it’s a “productive failure.” We just need to get up, make the adjustments, and continue on. By letting our fellows know that failure is ok, it takes some burden off of them to think they have to “get it right the first time,” but it’s also places a burden on them to learn from their mistakes. It also places that burden on the shoulders of those of us who have worked on this project to this point, and will continue to refine and adjust through the summer. No pressure, right? At any rate, we had a strong start, and we will keep up the momentum through the summer.
But enough about failure … there was lots of productive conversation this week. When we talked about the elements of digital scholarship projects, each DSSF had great examples for projects:
- Julia: Julia talked about Project Chop Suey: Immigration and Cuisine in America’s Chinatowns. This is one of Miriam Posner’s DH101 class projects. Discussion of this led us to think about what sorts of data we could mine from past Servo menus and recipes … something worth thinking about!
- Keira: The Knotted Line, a project that was new to me, had a really cool timeline visualization, as well as a Scalar structure, which falls in line with her interests. Also, Keira showed us Remembering Lincoln, which we talked about in the Special Collections visit; this project has a great collaborative element and has a well-organized structure and display.
- Lauren: Digital Detroit was Lauren’s project to share, she liked its emphasis on action verbs in the navigation, as well as its different types of visualizations. The two-tiered navigation structure was also a good feature from a digital project perspective, since it puts the emphasis on the content, while allowing access to the data and relevant information about the project itself.
In many ways, this first week gives me confidence that we can capture some of the spirit of other collaborative efforts, such as the ILiADS gathering at Hamilton College. Students get excited about this sort of work, and it’s infectious. We hope that is the vibe throughout the summer, and something we can bring to the Fall 2016 semester to the rest of the campus.
Looking forward to week 2!
–R.C.
