Digital Humanities Summer Insitute (DHSI)

Before learning about DHSI, I would never have described myself as a “digital humanist,” but the Institute had so many amazing classes that I couldn’t resist applying. I chose the Digital Public Humanities course because it appealed to my interests in community literacy and digital composing. Throughout the week I learned about incredible projects taking place across the country and the globe that continue to inspire my work. The community of DHSI is incredible and brings together people from across higher education and the world.

My experience at DHSI 2015 was an invaluable experience that expanded my knowledge of several areas of digital humanities (e-literature, coding, theory, etc.) that I am now able to apply in my classroom and research practices. I am extremely grateful to the New Media Writing Studio for this opportunity and would encourage others to apply for this scholarship.

I will describe my experience at DHSI 2014—a multi-faceted opportunity to learn about collaborative work in the digital humanities. The course I took was facilitated by a team affiliated with the Canadian Writing Research Collaborative (CWRC) project, whose website describes itself as “an online project designed to enable unprecedented avenues for studying the words that most move people in and about Canada.”

At DHSI, the course focused not so much on the content of the CWRC (i.e., Canadian culture) as on the strategies embedded in its online operations to support collaborative archive-building. Because the course also had an unadvertised agenda of recruiting new members for the CWRC community, it was at times less helpful than I anticipated around its stated goal of “exploring possibilities for collaboration throughout the entire scholarly workflow, with an emphasis on leveraging computers to assist with the collaborative process.” However, the camaraderie among all workshop participants was inspiring, and watching the course leaders struggle every day with various elements in their online materials was inspiring, in that it offered a reminder that digital humanities work must be open to challenges—indeed, must impress “snafus” as normal.

Beyond the course, as my contribution to the NMWS session will emphasize, other avenues at the institute were at least—if not more—fruitful that the course. These included lunchtime “birds of a feather” sessions with engaging topics and outstanding plenary speakers. DHSI for me, overall, was energizing and enabling, as I’ll share in my part of this group presentation.

This year was my third year at DHSI, and I finally had the opportunity to take Text Encoding Fundamentals. Although I had taken more advanced and interest-specific courses in past summers, learning the basics of TEI provided me with a stronger understanding of the unseen structure many Digital Humanities projects are built upon. It is also a skill set that wasn’t available to me during my own coursework or through faculty at TCU. As I spent a week struggling over TEI complexities with other junior and advanced scholars from around the world and across disciplines, the course gave us new ways to discuss how knowledge is made in other fields and how our work might be complementary. It embodies the goals I now hear about working in the Koehler Center: to break down academic silos, to do more collaborative work, and to share academic work more widely.

I hope anyone who holds similar goals and has an interest in shaping and crossing the boundaries of scholarship and technology has a chance to attend DHSI and represent TCU.

I was reluctant to apply to DHSI because I didn’t technically consider myself a digital humanist, and, as a rhetoric/composition person, I wasn’t sure if my research interests would align much with scholars who are typically oriented toward literary studies. And while it was certainly true that the work done at DHSI was much different than my own, it is also true that this experience couldn’t have been more productive for me. By placing myself in an intellectually uncomfortable environment, I was able to meet new people doing really innovative work vastly different from my own, and I was able to learn from them, find unanticipated connections to my own work, and more importantly, learn about the varied and important work going on in the digital humanities that I wouldn’t have otherwise considered.

Ultimately, what I took away was that being a digital humanist isn’t necessarily about becoming an expert in both your own specialty and digital/computational methods, but rather, learning to collaborate with people who know more than you, sharing your own expertise with them, and gaining new skills through that collaborative exchange. The diversity of ideas, methods, scholarship, and disciplinary orientations at DHSI is truly inspiring, and I recommend the conference to anyone with a remote interest in technology studies, at any skill level, and from any humanities-based field.