Author: Lauren White

Posted on

Final Reflections on Digital Scholarship

When I applied for the digital scholarship summer fellowship in the spring of my sophomore year, I had just started honing my academic interests. Looking back, I don’t remember having a distinct sense of self yet, or a feeling that I fit into the larger Gettysburg College community. Participating in the digital scholarship program that first summer, and over the course of the past two years, taught me the value of putting scholarship into practice and engaging with communities, and shaped many of my core values.

Some of the irony of digital scholarship is that digital scholars constantly struggle to define the field, even as they work to produce answers that are accessible to a general public. This is not to say that ambiguity is negative–dwelling in different theories and questions helps a person think more broadly, and consider perspectives they otherwise wouldn’t have. However, it’s important to know when to leave this space, decide on an answer, and create work from what you’ve learned (to “get it on the site,” one might say). Digital scholarship taught me to balance theory and practice. While my theoretical and historical work on activism was (and is) important, I realized that I had to back it up by taking action myself. Digital scholarship provided me with the groundwork I needed to be involved in the Gettysburg community–to take the intersectional frameworks I learned about as a student in the classroom and apply it to my daily life. Learning does not stop at evaluating another person’s ideas, it involves contributing your own to the discussion.

In my future, I see myself using digital tools and my digital literacy to encourage others to take action. Digital scholarship taught me to value accessibility. For me, this is not only about making information easily available and understandable, but also about inviting people to take action themselves. When I submitted my initial application to be a DSSF, I wasn’t certain that I had the capacity to complete a project. Being a part of the program showed me the I could, in fact, conduct research, present it to others, form communities, and lead. Wherever my future leads me, I’d like to use digital tools to create narratives that engage people’s ideas and encourage them to take action themselves.

By far, the most important thing I learned as a member of the digital scholarship team at Musselman Library was the importance of engaging with communities. All of the work I’ve done over the past two years came to fruition because I had help and support from a strong network of mentors and co-workers. Oftentimes, it can be difficult to approach or engage with social justice issues because they seem so infeasible. However, coming together to critically engage with discourse creates the potential for productive change. I know that I will take this lesson into the rest of my future life.

Posted on

What We Did Here, One Year Later

About a week and a half ago, Facebook sent me a notification to let me know that I had a memory to look back on. I opened the app, and saw the message I had composed at the end of the We Won’t Stand for Hate movement, a student-led initiative to resist the hate speech on campus that spiked following the 2016 election. My post encouraged people to engage with a digital collection I’d helped to make with Musselman Library called “What We Did Here.” In the post, I encouraged students to “upload written testimony, audio, pictures, or video that reflect[ed their] experience as a Gettysburg student, no matter what [their] identity, political affiliation, or opinion” so that their voices could be “heard, respected, and responded to.” After that day, What We Did Here became an involved part of my life. For the remainder of the fall, I worked with library staff to improve the website as we started to receive submissions. It was encouraging to see that students and staff were contributing to the site, and that media from other movements on campus (such as a demonstration by students of color that had taken place the previous spring) were among the submissions. When I was abroad in the spring, I kept an eye on What We Did Here as another student movement took place: the Muslim Student Solidarity rally, which was held as a counter space to a talk being given at the same time by Robert Spencer. When I was back at the library over the summer, I continued outreach about the project on a number of occasions. I gave a presentation about the site at Keystone DH, a conference held in Philadelphia, PA, and encouraged alumni from the class of 1971 to contribute items over the course of alumni weekend. A small feature on What We Did Here was also featured in the Spring 2017 volume of the Friends of Musselman Library newsletter.

Despite the various contributions people have made on the site, I still feel like there is room for improvement and growth. Our Gettysburg DH cohort often jokes about the “log cabin in the sky” –a less grandiose reality of the “castle in the sky” you initially envision as the outcome of your project. When we initially designed the website, I thought that it would go viral, gain a massive following, and revolutionize Gettysburg all at once. But, something I’ve learned in my research, (and seemingly ignored in this instance), is that social justice initiatives take time, and often operate on a small scale, particularly on a campus such as Gettysburg’s. However, this doesn’t mean that these initiatives aren’t impactful.  At this time, I think future steps and development should be about increasing student awareness so that students are aware that they can engage with the site at any time, and that the items that they contribute have an important place in college history. What We Did Here has the potential to benefit the entire campus community, but only if we rethink and continue our outreach. As the semester comes to an end, I plan on working with the DH cohort and doing my own evaluation on the project to brainstorm new ways we can increase awareness of the site in the spring.

Posted on

Project Update

At this point, we are a little over the halfway point for our summer. My project work so far has been similar to the work I did last summer; I’ve identified five more events to add to my timeline, charted the story of each event using stories in The Gettysburgian, and added the summaries to my scalar site. My hope for this summer is that, because I’ve completed most of the work I’ve done last summer, I will be able to explore more ways to use scalar to my advantage, especially through the annotation tool, and can provide more context for each of my events.

When I returned to my research at the beginning of the summer, I felt very frustrated by both my research itself and its presentation. Last summer, I did not know what my research would entail. Consequently, I was energized whenever I found something relevant to my project. However, as I’ve continued, I’ve become increasingly frustrated with the lack of information surrounding each event, especially because I want my website to interest users enough for them to become involved in activism themselves. As I discovered last summer, most instances of student-led social justice movements were led by small groups of people and were only briefly sustained. As such, people did not devote a lot of energy to documentation. Particularly frustrating is the lack of media available for each event. As much as I try to provide a comprehensive history of the social movement in question, many events on my website feel incomplete.

However, I think that hope is far from lost. What We Did Here, Musselman Library’s digital collection for activism on campus, has been receiving submissions since the fall. Seeing as it is more effective than my own attempt at crowd-sourcing, I hope to incorporate it into my website.  I also used a slightly different research method this summer than I did last year. Rather than starting with college histories and issues of The Gettysburgian, I started in special collections and framed my events around materials we have in vertical files. This way, I was guaranteed that there would be supplemental media my users could interact with. On the whole, I’m hoping that the five new events I add to my timeline will be more interactive and comprehensive, and that they will help to emphasize the importance of campus activism and the need for other students to become involved.

Posted on

We Need More Undergrads

I found Ryan Cordell’s article, “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities,” to be particularly refreshing because he did not shy away from addressing a number of things I’ve experienced when I try to mentor fellow undergrads (or in my own undergraduate experience in DH). His assertion, “that we must work to take both undergraduate disinterest and graduate resistance as instructive for the future of DH in the classroom,” is incredibly important. It’s tempting to ignore undergraduate apathy, or to gloss over it by idealizing digital humanities as being  a brand-new and flawless alternative to traditional scholarship, but doing so further alienates undergraduates and hinders the constructive development and growth of the field. In thinking about this blog post, I reflected on my now year-long experience in DH and developed a few hypotheses about why Gettysburg undergraduates haven’t engaged with digital projects.

I entered the field of DH last summer as a digital scholarship summer fellow. As such, my sole focus for ten weeks was digital scholarship–both the theory behind the field and how I could apply the theory to transform and present my own personal research interest. Initially, the field was scary; I was wandering into unfamiliar territory and working with previously unheard of tools. However, I had the resources and time I needed to work my way through the field and produce a project I was proud of. The “so what?” of digital humanities became clear to me–I felt like I was making a difference and potentially educating others.

Unfortunately, I do not think that most undergraduates who are assigned digital projects at Gettysburg over the course of the school year feel the same as I did at the conclusion of last summer. In my opinion, (and from what I know from my experience), the number one reason why undergraduates don’t engage with the digital humanities is because they do not have the time that they need to immerse themselves in the field during the semester. Consequently, they miss the all important “so what?” that validated my summer research and brought me back to the program as a senior fellow. When students are asked to complete digital projects during the school year, they are often rushed, stressed, and not necessarily interested in the project that they’ve been asked to complete. Under these conditions, time is budgeted according to priority. A major reason why Julia, Keira, and I chose to do the fellowship last summer was because we were passionate about our self-selected research topic. Prioritizing digital tools and facets of DH theory was worth it for the sake of actively engaging with and educating others on a topic we cared about. Our projects were also interminable–we were prepared to return to them and continue their life. It is unlikely that a student would feel the same way about a project assigned to their class. Ordinarily, the project would be an item on a checklist, completed for the sake of a grade, and then left once the project was over.

As discouraging as this may seem, I do think that there is a concrete way to bridge undergraduates and the digital humanities–involving more undergraduates in programs like the digital scholarship fellowship, and giving undergraduates representation within DH. Julia, Keira, and I all understand the challenges that may prevent a student from involving themselves in DH for the sake of a school project. However, we also know all of the benefits of being a DH practitioner, and why introducing and using digital tools is so important. Accordingly, we lower the barrier of entry by showing the student that one of their peers was able to create a project, and can provide them with feasible advice and scope for their own work. Additionally, it is important for more and more undergraduates to share their experiences and projects at conferences and within their colleges or universities. Too often, undergrads are mentioned at conferences, but are not there themselves. Fellow non-undergraduate DH practitioners can gain realistic insight by hearing from students, and undergraduate researchers see themselves represented, which is important for developing interest in the field and forming a functioning community of practice.

Posted on

Why Resistance Matters

In their chapter, “Pedagogies of Race: Digital Humanities in the Age of Ferguson,” Amy Earheart and Toniesha Taylor discuss their project, White Violence, Black Resistance, which blends activism and digital scholarship into a cohesive entity. As I was reading the chapter, I recognized a number of similarities between Earheart and Taylor’s work and my own. One of the goals for my project has been to highlight the narratives of people who have been left out of mainstream campus histories–this is also a goal of What We Did Here–simultaneously, White Violence, Black Resistance is an attempt to “disrupt erasure.” Both projects, then, are projects of resistance. In their text, Earheart and Taylor write, “A focus on points of resistance is central to student learning. Just as we as faculty collaborators interrogate moments of resistance in our partnership, we encourage students to understand how points of resistance in their own work, in the historical narrative, or the technical interface reveal crucial moments of engagement and insight. Instead of following a lockstep approach to a text, we ask the students to creatively interrogate the text within a broader context.” In my opinion and experience, resistance is marked by three qualifiers: it is driven by need, strengthened by collaboration, and requires active participation. As Earheart and Taylor imply, this resistance extends past projects, and it opens possibilities–a phenomenon we have come into contact with a number of our responsibilities as senior fellows.

As alluded to earlier, I thought there were a number of similarities between White Violence, Black Resistance and the two projects I have been working on–This is Why We Fight, and What We Did Here. The projects are driven by a need to recover narratives that have historically been excluded, they are strengthened and made possible by a number of partnerships, (my project and What We Did Here would not have been possible without the support of Musselman Library and the Digital Scholarship Working group, and rely on group contribution, while White Violence, Black Resistance relies on Earheart and Taylor’s teamwork and the incorporation of their students), and they come to fruition because people put forth the action and effort they need to be completed.

Taylor and Earheart’s chapter also talks about lowering barriers of entry so that the greatest number of people possible can connect and involve themselves with their project. This is also an act of resistance as it disrupts a normal hierarchy of involvement within university and digital systems. As digital fellows, we are attempting to do the same thing with our OER. There is a need for making digital tools and projects more accessible to a greater number and range of people–this is something we discussed when we defined openness and accessibility as being one of our cohort’s DH values this summer. Our OER is a collaborative effort-we are all creating it together, and it will be reviewed by a number of people. We also have to make an active effort beyond simply making the project in thinking critically about our audience and what we hope that they understand from our lesson. By creating a source that is open to a general audience, we are resisting elitist and exclusive narratives.

In the digital humanities and other learning pursuits, resistance becomes an opportunity for education and enrichment because it requires that the learners define their needs, utilize collaboration, and actively engage with whatever situation they are placed in. Though resistance may be challenging, it is productive and influential, and I am excited to see it being incorporated into dssf17.

css.php