A Mosaic of People

In a small town in Slovenia, Ana Ros co-owns a world-renown restaurant with her husband. While discussing her success as a chef, she stated that, “when one is loved, she can create better.” As a Digital Scholarship Summer Fellow, I experienced this type of productive love by being a member of the Digital Humanities community of practice.

A community of practice is a group of people in a profession who are oriented towards a similar goal. The similarities that tie the people to one another create a support system within the group itself and encourage the further development of the digital humanities. The DSSF working group taught me that this support system is rooted in trust–I trust that the working group, my fellows, and the larger DH community will critique, guide, inform and inspire my work as they have done in the past.

Had I entered the program and been left to my own devices, I (and my project) would have been misguided and dysfunctional. The only person I could have had trust in was  myself, which would have been terrifying and impossible because I didn’t have any experience in the field of digital humanities and hardly any in the realm of technology. In our very first week of the fellowship, we were introduced to the definition of DH through various pieces of dialogue and critique. Examining and discussing multiple people’s opinions proved that the only way to truly carry out the digital humanities was to become immersed in the community of practice.

Connecting with various members of the DH community this summer emphasized to me that projects are driven by passion. Consequently, people apply the same passion to the DH field more generally and help build the foundation of trust by sharing, working on, and analysing other people’s work. By devoting the same level of enthusiasm to another person’s project that one would devote to their own, the community of practice makes clear that they are devoted continuing the development of DH and spreading it to various communities.
The idea that DH is a community of practice implies that it is self reliant. The main support for the field comes from within, rather than from exterior or corporate entities. This gives members of the community greater autonomy and the possibility for new and innovative ways of creativity and learning. The community is made up of a mosaic of people, who each have the opportunity to contribute their own work and ideas to advance and promote DH.