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Defining a nebulous term like “digital scholarship” or “digital humanities” is quite hard. Digital Scholarship comes in many shapes and forms, and people hold different personal definitions of the subject. In readings by Amanda Visconti, Lisa Spiro, and Paige Morgan, examples of digital humanities projects were given, and they all varied greatly. Digital scholarship or humanities have potential to be a continual group reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses, an archive of tweets about current social events for posterity, and many other things. Spiro’s in particular focused not on the format, but the content and values that went into creating a project, like collaboration and experimentation.  No two DH projects are alike, however, they all use similar key elements to guide their work.  The combination of these aspects creates DH, which I define as   

an endeavor that utilizes digital tools and platforms to enhance creations, are open to a larger community and perspectives, and are informed through risks and experimentation.

All this said, this definition does not encompass all of my thoughts on the subject or the many definitions that exist elsewhere. DH and DS are still being cemented as ideas, and it will change as time goes on. I do not expect this definition to remain as it is by the end of this fellowship. Like any good DH project, this definition has the ability to evolve and change as more knowledge and perspectives inform me throughout this experience.

Even with a definition, it is hard to really pin down exactly what DH is. Projects can have elements of DH in them, but that does not mean they are DH outright. We had a lengthy debate about whether the creation of metadata for digitized collections counts as Digital Scholarship. Certainly, elements are there, and it is explicitly digital. Those who worked in Special Collections, however, argued against its inclusion. They argued that what they did, what choices they made, were not explicitly DH, as they did not intend them to be.

That is most important- intent. As long as a project incorporates values and aspects of DS and DH with the intent to be so, it can be considered so. It is counter intuitive to debate the exact nature of digital scholarship and humanities. The field encompasses so much, and is still changing, still becoming. That is why it is hard to define. Over the summer, I will look to values of DH to guide my work. I will collaborate, experiment, and utilize the community built here. In the end, my project may not fit all definitions of DH, but that should not discredit it. The intent and values driving DH research are complex, individualized, and make it hard to define. They also make DH what it is, and I look forward to working with it. I will refine my definition, learn how to connect and communicate, and let the values drive me to do better work. DH is going to be great. 

 

By Emma Lewis

My name is Emma Lewis, and I’m one of the new 2017 DSSF cohort. Over the summer, I will be working on a “choose-your-own-adventure” style audio tour of the streets of Gettysburg. My goal is to show a greater depth of history in these streets outside of the typical history shown. How I will do that is still uncertain. After just one week here I am rethinking my format and what tools can be used to communicate these ideas! On top of regular research, I am going to experiment with how to present information, testing how it is received in different formats. I want people to have the best experience possible navigating whatever I create, which requires me to be open to failure. With what I’ve heard from last year’s cohort, I can look forward to plenty of that, and it will be amazing.

Hi everyone! My name is Brittany Russell and I am a rising junior and political science major and Middle Eastern studies minor at Gettysburg College. I am the music director at Gettysburg College’s radio station, 91.1FM WZBT, and it may surprise you that I’m working with art this summer.  My project analyzes twelve lithographs from Les Maitres de l’Affiche collection from the 1890s, and are currently in Gettysburg’s Special Collections, tracking their journey to Gettysburg and the inspiration. I’m thrilled for the opportunity to be here, and I’m excited to learn more about digital humanities and scholarship!

Digital Humanities is an extremely tough thing to define. Every digital scholar has their own unique definition, and I can assure you that my definition is likely going to be different from those in my cohort and even the senior fellows. I define digital scholarship and humanities as:

the practice of engaging with the scholarly community to collaborate and learn more information to create better, more engaging, and more approachable projects for the education and archival of all.

Even then, that probably doesn’t cover everything involved, and that’s a pretty broad definition. So, let’s break it down:

• the practice of engaging with the scholarly community: What I mean here is that there are no boundaries on the internet, and that makes it superbly easy to engage with other scholars via Twitter, Slack, and more. I can ask questions to other people who have a better idea of what they’re doing, and share my story with other amateur scholars so they can learn from the mistakes I make along the way. That’s the real treasure.
• collaborate and learn more information: Again, I can ask questions about my project and my research from people who are usually too up in the ivory tower to be truly approachable. It levels the playing field in the interest of making sure that knowledge is accurate and shared with all.
• to create better, more engaging, and more approachable projects: The primary goal of scholarship is to learn. One thing that scholarship gets critiqued for is that scholars are too busy being those darned liberal elites to be approachable and engage with others to share their knowledge. Since our projects will be on the internet, anyone can look at them (even Donald Trump or David Hasselhoff). Our projects are meant to share what we’ve learned during our ten weeks here, and that means that they can’t be sloppy, inaccurate, or too complicated to use and process that information.
• for the education and archival of all: Welcome to the internet, where someone somewhere has an archive or screenshot of your website and nothing ever gets deleted. Therefore, people can always learn from your website, but it can also save and archive information that may be disappearing. For example, Laurie Allen at the Pennsylvania Library Association Digital Humanities workshop discussed how she’s working to preserve climate change data and make it still accessible despite those at the top trying to delete it and deny that climate change is real. That’s a separate issue, but her work is important to maintain that learning experience for the world to use and still fight climate change. As far humanities goes, I’m going to use the example of digitization projects that preserve high quality scans of documents, artwork, and more. While that is absolutely not a substitute for keeping the actual piece being digitized as well preserved as possible, it still makes a piece more accessible to the general public so they can learn from it too.

I may have more to add to this at the end of ten weeks. We’ll find out together, shall we?