Hello and welcome to my blog!
My name is Rhian Dunn. I am a second year doctoral student in the forensic anthropology program at MSU – although it’s hard to believe that I’ve already been here for a year and a half! This semester I am taking a Digital Methods Seminar, one requirement of which, is a weekly blog post. So welcome to my space where I will attempt to better understand digital methods and how I can use them within my own research.
I’m fairly new to Digital Humanities (DH) and so it’s been really insightful to dive into our readings this week and see how those within the field of DH define it – partially because there doesn’t seem to be one go-to definition. One Blog Post within Debates Within Digital Humanities (2014), titled “Day of DH: Defining the Digital Humanities,” provides a series of definitions given by practitioners ahead of the annual A Day in the Life of Digital Humanities (A Day in DH) and features a range of answers – from the use of DH as an umbrella term for countless digital endeavors to simply “I don’t: I’m sick of trying to define it” (Amanda French, Center for History and New Media, United States). But it is actually this lack of a straight definition that truly helps me better understand this field because how can you define something that is constantly changing as technology advances and re-establishes what can be done for research. Ultimately, I appreciated a distinction brought forward in Fitzpatrick’s chapter of Debates Within Digital Humanities (2014), titled “The Humanities, Done Digitally.” Fitzpatrick (2014) emphasizes the difference between DH and humanities (H?) – as the choice of methods used in addressing a specific research question – are you using digital methods or using more standard methods in “H” to look at digital objects?
One thing that stood out to me from our readings on DH that I find reflected in my own field of forensic anthropology is the growth of “academic” Twitter. Several years ago I swore up and down that I would never fall into the realm of Twitter – what could I say in only 140 characters and why would I? However, low and beyond, I’ve been converted and have come to appreciate how Twitter makes users think more carefully (sometimes) about what they can say about their research that is short, comprehensive, and understandable to a public audience. It’s hard to claim that research is for the public well being when publications are out of reach, locked up in journals charging an arm and a leg for just one article. While Twitter hasn’t solved that problem just yet, it does allow researchers to actually engage with their intended audience and hold a conversation that is not always possible in another format. While the use of Twitter does not really fall into the realm of DH, it does highlight how digital platforms as a whole are advantageous and are becoming an essential way to communicate ideas.
One last thing I find important to touch on is a topic that we discussed in our first week of class and was raised again in one of our readings, “Complicating a “Great Man” Narrative of Digital History in the United States” (2014). This topic is that of what is hidden in the field of DH – namely, the failure to properly cite or recognize the work of individuals who fall outside of the bounds of institution, tenure track positions, or other “prestigious” positions. We began this discussion in class last week regarding the use of citations and the fact that many scholars fail to specify their sources as electronic, instead citing the original work as if they had gone to the collection personally. Not only does this disvalue how information is gathered, it also overlooks the individuals involved in the process of providing that information – whether they assisted in digitizing a series of works or actually complied resources in a database for other scholars. Research via technology is at times as easy as breathing and feels almost like magic, but that does not mean that it is magic. Someone or some program out there is responsible for our ease and has earned our acknowledgement. Leon (2014) further engages in this discussion by highlighting the lack of individuals, often women, in the historical record of DH. Many individuals are overlooked because they do not hold full time positions or have not yet reached a salary level that enables them to act as a PI on a project – and so are lost out in memory in favor of someone else. We need to better represent and recognize all voices within a project so that we are not left with just a selective history taken for unquestionable fact.
Thank you for reading my blog! If you liked what you read, look out for what I have in store next week!
