Similar to my response last week, I feel that discussions about DH as a discipline that link it to other broad topics tend to be unproductive, since each practitioner of DH tends to have different ideas of what their project contributes to the discipline as well as how their project (re)defines the discipline. In that spirit I would like to focus this reflection on how my interactions with DH have affected my specific project.
Pretty early on, I changed my vision for the way I wanted to present my project. Most of our first discussions about DH emphasized the diverse possibilities for our product. During our project management session we talked about the “log cabin in the sky” philosophy of planning, where plans are lofty but attainable, but I was inspired by many of our other sessions. Early on, while attempting to define DH, we talked about the emphasis on experimentation and the possibility that comes with it. This allowed me to make plans for my project that I wouldn’t otherwise have ventured, having no idea what attainable even was for my project and the platforms I hoped to use. Since then, I’ve been genuinely amazed at the product I’ve been able to create. I’ve never had faith in my ability to work with technology of any kind since I’ve always filed it under “math and other things I can’t do.” Although I’m by no means a tech wizard, this fellowship has really changed my views about what’s possible through DH as well as what’s possible for me. In every experience where I buckled down to make something digital although terrified of breaking it, I’ve been delighted by the result. Still, if I hadn’t been encouraged early on about the possibilities for my project, my product would have been entirely different.
In addition to the way the presentation of my project has changed through specific conversations, the content of my project has changed as well. Coming into this program I had a fairly conservative idea for my website in that it would be a relatively simple interconnection of information that I gathered in a very traditional way. I imagined myself finding materials about each author in the same way (and from the same sources) as I would for a traditional essay. Then I imagined writing brief essays that bring together my source material, again with an emphasis on similarity to traditional essays. Since my project is primarily for use in the classroom, I assumed that the only way to make it seem validate was to replicate traditional scholarship on a digital platform. When I started my research, I definitely struggled with fitting this kind of research to the eight-week timeline because of the sheer number of authors I wanted to fully cover. As I result, I started using different sources and feeling more comfortable linking out to online sources rather than summarizing them as I would with a traditional project. In this way, the time frame of the project forced me to change my methods for my project; however, it was one of our discussions about DH that made me change my views of the project.
One of the most productive discussions — at least for me — that we’ve had about DH was our ongoing conversation about what “counts” both as DH and as scholarship. Although I have been jokingly asking “is this DH?” about seemingly minute details, the repetition of the phrase has definitely shaped how I conceive of DH, but moreover how I conceive of scholarship. If you had asked me at the beginning of this experience if I would consider linking out to sites like Wikipedia rather than writing a biography for some of these authors, I’d have told you that was a cop-out, largely because in traditional work, it would be viewed that way. At this point in the process, I recognize that the work done on Wikipedia is valuable and freely available, so not using it for the sake of presenting legitimacy is not a good option either.
I appreciate this reflection on the evolution of your thinking! Have you considered improving some of those Wikipedia pages? This is something we didn’t have time to do in the fellowship, but is always available. There are many teachers who use Wikipedia as a pedagogical opportunity, something you may want to consider as you begin teaching. See http://theconversation.com/using-wikipedia-a-scholar-redraws-academic-lines-by-including-it-in-his-syllabus-39103?utm_content=buffer00e61&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer and http://openpedagogy.org/assignment/murder-madness-and-mayhem/
I’m glad your work is pushing the boundaries of your expectations, and that as your research has evolved, so has your project, as that is really a key component of this program. If all we wanted you to do was to do traditional research and put it on a website, we could teach you WordPress and a few other things for a week and then just not engage with you for the rest of the time.
As for tech confidence, there’s no expectation to emerge from this as a “tech wizard,” but rather grow in your confidence to use and critically evaluate technology. There’s always Google, online tutorials, asking for help, etc. when it comes to learning how to use tech. But at the conclusion of this program you should excise the idea of tech as being something you can’t do, because you CAN do it and ARE doing it and doing it better than a lot of people your age. I’m really proud of what you’ve accomplished (you as in you and y’all)!