It’s been a while since we’ve last posted, but not for lack of activity. Like a trio of academic bees, we’ve been buzzing around the library for the last several weeks, working hard on our digital projects and the larger website that houses them. With the projects completed and the internship coming to a close, we encourage you to visit our site, DH Blueprints: Teaching Digital Humanities by Example. Like the tagline suggests, we’ve created and presented our digital projects as the focal point of this educational sight with the intent of providing models for students and teachers to learn more about what goes into a digital project. We’ve also included a wide range of information that we hope gives a broad overview of digital humanities, from its origins to contemporary interests within the field to its terminology. If you’d told me at the beginning of the summer that instead of one collaborative digital project we interns would do three individual projects and collaborate on another, I would’ve said that seems- impractical. But that’s exactly what we did and I don’t think it could’ve work out better any other way.
After our period of self directed research secondary research, we had many exciting and interesting topics to possibly explore digitally. After much discussion through project proposal meetings with library staff, we reasoned that the best possible route would be not one larger digital project, but three smaller ones. This would allow us to pursue different topics and questions with different digital tools.
Out of these conversations also came the idea of teaching people about digital humanities and how to do digital projects through a website (or as we eventually dubbed it, a ‘meta-project’) The idea of a meta-project was exciting for two reasons: First, there weren’t many ‘meta’ sites that balanced creating and explaining digital projects in the way we envisioned. Secondly, it made sense to have multiple models for people to learn about doing digital scholarship work.
Once we knew what our overarching goal was, we set out to work on our individual projects and the website. To make the website more than just a showcase for our individual work, we wanted to document and synthesize the steps that went into each project . We also had to come up with informative content on DH and determine a structure for that info (To see some of what we included, you can start by visiting DH Blueprints’ ‘What is DH?’ section).
Our projects were different in focus yet still connected by the books in the Kim-Wait Eisenberg Collection of Native American Literature. The whole endeavor sounds like a lot, and it is. But by the end, we felt like we accomplished what we set out to do- engage with and explain the potential of this type of scholarship.