Week Four Reflective Essay

Although #transformDH was initially started to call attention to a panel about transformative DH, it subsequently became a call to action for practitioners of DH to transform the discipline. I think this dual meaning of “transform” – one that acts as a verb and one that is short for the adjective “transformative” – raises questions relevant to all DH projects.

The first meaning – the adjective “transformative” – describes the way DH projects should affect both those who interact with it and the project itself. In terms of being transformative of the project, I have already seen my goals for this website shift in new and exciting ways. While the act of researching an idea will often necessarily change the end result, in DH the methods are also transformative because the tools that are available to me can allow for new connections and changes to my original conception of design. As transformative for an audience, DH projects should open new doors and raise new questions in such a way that the audience is not merely taking in knowledge, but actively discovering and complicating it. In my project, I want my audience to move freely through a web of related authors so they can make their own connections, rather than merely reading how I think one author is like another. My project is and ought to be only the beginning of an exploration into the way authors of multiple identities are working with similar themes in unique ways. As a non-DH project, I could argue my perspective about the similarities and differences of two authors and complicate the field in a small way, but DH allows for me to make a bigger impact by nature of the fact that more people can find more connections that could ever have been possible in a traditional project. (As a caveat, I want to point out that this is not to say there is no value in traditional projects; sometimes a project idea is not suited to DH and to force certain methods onto a project of a different scope is not necessarily the right answer.)

The second meaning – the verb “transform” – is somewhat broader in scope. To “transformDH” means to look from my individual project to its place in a massive discipline. The sheer scope of DH projects is vast because, as an ever-changing, relatively new discipline, part of the work of DH is determining what constitutes DH. When one begins to consider how certain activities that seem distinctly un-academic can be seen in terms of DH, one can get overwhelmed by how huge the discipline already is. Existential dread of the endlessness of data aside, trying to transform any discipline can be overwhelming. Rather than conceive of my project as one that must change DH – a daunting task even without considering this is an eight week program – I have been thinking about how the project as it already is can do the work of transforming. I think that my project is already just the seed of similar kinds of projects that open up the expectations of a certain topic (eg American Gothic) for inquiry rather than merely reifying existing definitions of it; important Gothic is white, male, heterosexual, middle class, and able because we continue to describe it thus. While my project does not propose a new definition of Gothic, it inherently suggests it by including the works of underrepresented authors as those critical to defining the discipline. While I know my project is small in terms of space (a nebulous concept, I know), I think it is doing the work of transforming the discipline of DH, as well as the discipline of English.