Bonus?!
Yes you now get to sit and read my never-ending pondering about the humanities and history in the digital world! After the semester ended, I wanted to give my bonus thoughts about DH and how I have experienced it in academics versus careers offered today.
The thing I loved about this class is that it took what I know, and made me question it. By this I mean, I know that academia is always developing and has gone through stages of reevaluating works already done and what could be recontextualized in a news lens. Things like Women’s History, LGBTQIA+, or Black History! This class served as a reminder to me that digital history is not always scanning and digitizing documents. Technology expands so fast that we haven’t had a chance to discover all of its full uses! Instead of talking about the past versus future of DH like I did in my last blog post, this train of thought is more focused on the philosophical question of what is DH methodology? This thought actually had its start when I tried to define what DH is in blog one.
Methodology:
Through the set up of the class, I got to see only some of the tools and methods that digital historians use. These tools help to dive deeper into the research or reorganize the results to make it easier to understand. I personally didn’t love networking because I still have a hard time reading it. I think it is not a very clear form of communication to the audience. Well aside from the honorable mention in Module 7 about Data Visualization! However, I understand the goal behind network analysis which is shown off quite well bi one of the group projects for the end of the semester assignment. This is their website, and they focused on the connection between Spanish TV networks and their shows. Basically I see network analysis as supplemental.
QGIS was fun! I will say that there is a bit of a learning curve to it, but much easier than I expected. I am happy to learn more about mapping because the possibilities are endless with it. Other parts of this class that I thought were important were in a bit of every topic. Project management, data management, accessibility, and sustainability just to name a few. These are great because no matter how technical DH gets, we are still part of the humanities.
Ending rambling thoughts:
I would say that this post is a bit of rambling, but I’ve seen my growth since undergrad alone. I used to think that historians worked as researches or in museums, but there is so much more to that. Video games I play at night have hired historians to portray the design and culture just right and it shows. I also realized there are many more reasons to learn Excel besides tracking bills! When thinking about how different history is methodized in grad school, I think of a great quote from my favorite undergrad professor:
Historians are paid to think for you; don’t let them
It sounds so simple, but we tend to read and believe it. Question what you think you know!
Great post Emily! I love your wrap-up of what you got out of the class. I’m totally with you in learning about all the new tools and especially about questioning. I had not really thought about biases and motivations much before especially in regards to digital tools, which I saw more as factual or neutral. After this class I can see that everything has a viewpoint and we need to find out what that is and be able to see behind the results put out by historians, search engines, etc. I really got a lot out of the project management part too as I am not always very organized so having some tools and ideas to help with that is great.
A really great wrap-up to the semester! At the beginning of the semester, I was certainly with you in thinking that there wasn’t much to DH, but I feel like I’ve learned so much that I otherwise would not have explored on my own. I think what is important about the tools that we have used is that they are applicable to such a wide range of topics and material. We are going to be able to use these skills throughout everything else that we are going to learn and I think that is great.
I really liked you post. I feel like I have learned a lot also just in my first semester at George Mason in courses and in everyone that I interact with. It feels like I have learned a lot of new things that I would not have otherwise. I am glad that DH and digital history are considering diversity and representation more, and I just hope that they will continue to be more in conversation with others as time goes on. I think of probably what I consider my home discipline of African American Studies, and how scholars in there have been talking about the digital world mostly in terms of access for decades and more recently individual scholars have been participating or creating digital humanities project, but I hope that in the future years that these discussions and tools or this discipline will begin to enter into the formal training of students.
Absolutely agree with this. I am finishing Black Europe and Dr. P is an amazing wealth of knowledge. She normally teaches undergrad, but this was a great way for me to dive into understanding the lack of diverse voices in the past. There are profound new authors talking about the “real” history by using capitalist methods (reading ledgers or merchants logs) to find new perspectives that would have talked more about slaves/slavery. I would love to see these methods to become normalized to add to the pages of history
OMG — thank you for the shout out lol! I didn’t expect that, and it’s so sweet to see that you found our project useful in depicting that methodology.
I am so dazzled by your group project and with art history overall. My BFF is doing the MA-PHD program in art history over at UMD, so I got really excited when I went through the Digital Art History module for her. Somehow, even the digital art history module seemed to not be directly about art history?! I really loved the article that was arguing against digital art history — is this a common dialog happening in art history worlds? Was that argument new to you?
I feel like such a rube talking to history students sometimes, since I previously come from a performing arts background. I appreciated your candor and willingness to be so participatory in every class, I wish I had that youth in me still ;_; I hope you have a beautiful end to your year!
Aw thanks, the girls really helped to bring the website and research to life! This was a bit of a new argument for me but it makes sense when DH is still trying to be edgy and make a new name for itself, in my opinion. And thank you for entertaining my rambling/devils advocate thinking haha you have a great end to your semester too!
This post is an excellent summary of the semester! Trying out these different pieces of software has shown me the true value of what DH has to offer to the humanities as a whole. While I entered in this course with very rusty PastPerfect and ArcGIS experience, I have found that many of these programs (Omeka especially) can provide great methods of displaying online work!
I feel like after this whole semester I just had to comment on your last blog post. Cheers to all the classy blog post titles we’ve come up with between the two of us.
I 10/10 agree with everything you’ve said in this post and just the summary of the semester in general. The sheer applicability of DH methods is already pretty vast, and it’s just expanding more and more.