Week 2 is in the books. It was a bit of an odd week logistically, bookended by Memorial Day and a field trip to Lafayette College to meet their Digital Humanities Summer Scholars. It was great to talk to fellow librarian and DH-er Sarah Morris and her group of students, do a little bit of cross-institutional networking, and think about the wider networking that goes on in DH on Twitter. It’s really important to know that we are not alone in the DH world; not only for the students who are engaged in the practice of DH, but also for those of us who are doing the teaching, the mentoring, the curricular builds, etc. Sometimes it seems like we are doing a lot of this work on our own, and it’s tempting to think we are islands on to ourselves. But, as we saw this week, we’re not, and we can learn from each other. A Lafayette student is working on a social justice project that mirrors Lauren’s project quite a bit, and also overlaps with Keira’s interests as well. Overall, a great experience! Plus, the Skillman Library is pretty neat.
This week was pretty heavy on the philosophical/project management/practical/planning aspects of DH, with workshops on project management and copyright; both are vital to the development of digital projects, even if they aren’t the most visceral things to be thinking about. However, if a project doesn’t have a strong charter, with clear deliverables and a timeline, it’s probably going to struggle when timing is the worst. And as we learned from Miriam Posner’s work this week, “Copyright kills dreams,” but by knowing a bit more about how copyright works, maybe our dreams die a little less (or we dream up something new).
But, back to the road trip. The trip out was a hodgepodge of different topics, from ranging from various school activities to religion, the sorts of things that people chat about when in a van for 2.5 hours. During the trip back to Gettysburg, our fellows asked to put on the soundtrack to Hamilton … I tend to run from ambivalent to hostile to musicals, but I had heard enough about it to be curious enough to turn over control of the speakers.
And honestly, it wasn’t that bad.
But enough about my personal issues with musical theater. What caught my attention is the repeated line, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”, which, I think, is a way to think about the DH/DS/public humanities world. All of our fellows are doing something narrative-based, from women’s history, to social justice, to Civil War cadets. They are telling the story of various people, some living, some dead. In some cases, these stories have never been told before; other stories will be presented in a new way, visualized and contextualized for audiences to be determined. At some institutions, the DH/DS model is very data/text analysis driven; in others, there’s a lot of network/topic modeling and visualization, and in others, like Gettysburg College, we are narrative/interpretive in how we develop these digital projects (at least, so far). This comes from having an outstanding Special Collections staff who put a lot of time and effort into collecting the materials that tell the stories of people at Gettysburg College. Stories are important to us, and telling them is a vital part of the projects we are working on this summer.
So, more Hamilton-themed posts for the summer? Maybe, we’ll see how long it shows up on my jogging playlist.
–R.C.
