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(Reposted from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s DH Fellows blog. See the original entry here.)

We spent our first year as DH Fellows tracking and discussing the blog posts that filtered through DH Now, and were asked to track specific themes. I decided to follow posts where DH and activism intersected, especially as the recent campaign, election, and administration made political conversations hard, even irresponsible, to ignore. Before Donald Trump’s election in November 2016, the grey literature of DH had had a slightly more intellectual focus. There were certainly many people thinking about critical theory in DH, but those advocating for DH as activism in its own right was not as visible of a conversation. Of course, there are some exceptions here, most obviously in the form of media scholars, and particularly those who incorporate feminist critical theory into their work (for instance the #TransformDH community that formed in 2011). Aside from these groups, much of the DH discussion was focused on how to study or support activists working in the age of multimodal movements like Black Lives Matter. Not surprisingly, the discussion has become not only more critical but more urgent. It seems that DH scholars from all disciplines started to take stock of what we do well—promoting open access knowledge with a balance between theory and praxis (although not always an equal balance)—and found new ways to deploy those skills as acts of resistance.

Read moreDigital Humanities as Resistance

(Reposted from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s DH Fellows blog. See the original entry here.)

We ended our first year as Digital History Fellows in the Public Projects Division. As someone with career goals in Public History, I was most excited to get to work in this division. However, doing this year-long rotation through the Center allowed me to witness the strengths of all three. I was able to work with projects I wasn’t familiar with, and become more familiar with ones I was, as well as gain a broad understanding of digital humanities work. It was also interesting to see how the various parts of the Center function with distinct tasks, work styles, and guiding philosophies, yet come together to create one cohesive Center.

Read moreWrapping up with Public Projects

(Reposted from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s DH Fellows blog. See the original entry here.)

Laura and I spent the first half of the Spring 2017 semester in the Research Division. We were given a range of tasks, some of which definitely took me out of my comfort zone. First, we were asked to work through the Python tutorials on The Programming Historian. After that, we worked through the HTML and CSS tutorials on Code Academy. At the same time, we are taking Clio II (or, Data and Visualization in Digital History), which is introducing us to R programming. So, I suddenly went from having no real familiarity with any coding languages, to having at least a cursory understanding of four. Although a bit overwhelming at first, I can now see the benefits of this kind of exposure, as it better enables me to assess other digital history projects and have realistic understandings of how this could fit into my own research. We were also asked to try out some of newly acquired HTML and CSS skills by designing a mock-up redesign for the Press Forward website. After spending an entire workday tinkering with row sizes, fonts, and colors, we produced a mock-up that really wasn’t so bad, and was actually pretty fun to build once I started to get the hang of it.

Read moreResearch Division

(Reposted from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s DH Fellows blog. See the original entry here.)

Our first rotation through the Center sent us to the Education Division (ED). Although set back from the main workspaces of the Center, it soon became clear that the ED’s work is central to the reputation and productivity of the Center. At our first weekly meeting, we were introduced to the progress board, a large white board listing each project in the ED and details about the progress of each. Every Tuesday morning, members of the ED would update the group on the progress of each project, of which there were many, and record those changes on the board. This all seemed a bit overwhelming at first, but by the end of our rotation I was (mostly) able to keep track of the many projects the ED is constantly (and successfully) juggling.

Read moreAn Eight-Week Education

(Reposted from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s DH Fellows blog. See the original entry here.)

We began our first year as DH Fellows in a seminar where we were asked to choose a project from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s 20^th anniversary site, and develop an Omeka exhibit that tells the history of that project. The Lost Museum, an early online game developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, immediately caught my attention. The Lost Museum allows users to move through a virtual recreation of P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, destroyed by an unsolved arson attack in 1865, while investigating potential suspects and learning about 19^th century social, political, and cultural history (to learn more, visit the exhibit). A professor assigned this game in a class I took as undergraduate, and I remember discussing the project not just for its historical content, but as a historical artifact itself. It has been updated since then, but still maintains the characteristics of an early internet website: playful, creative, and idiosyncratic. Developing this exhibit has allowed me to explore the early days of digital humanities projects, and the direction the RRCHNM has gone in since then.

Read morePlaying With History

In The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, James Gleick explores how recording and transferring information has evolved through intellectual technologies (first writing, then the book, then the library, and on and on, until we reached the Internet). In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr grounds his work in cognitive science to explore the implications of the ever-present internet on our ever-evolving minds. These two books raised more questions than answers, three of which I will attempt to unpack below (with even more questions).

Read moreWhat IS the internet doing to our brains?