With the end of the semester only a few days away, it is time to reflect on the course and my work this semester. I was very nervous when I first started our Digital Methods course this semester, as this was the first non-anthropology or non-anatomy course I have taken since I was an undergraduate student. I was nervous because I knew I would unfamiliar with the theoretical frameworks used across humanities, a problem I encountered even in my first cultural anthropology course at MSU because my master’s degree was so forensically focused. And that’s not even considering the actual digital methods portion of the course! While I had dabbed a little in Text Analysis last summer, I was entirely self-taught and knew I had a lot to learn and even reflect on, which I did heavily in some of my blogs this semester. However, during that process realized how fun it was to work with digital methods and was excited to take this course and see what else was out there and how it could be applied to humanities (and especially anthropological) research.
I really enjoyed the structure of the course, although it would have been fun to do the Unit II activities together in person, as I found myself dabbling in quite a few forums to solve (sometimes very easy) problems. I think it would have been fun to bounce ideas off of each other, but I understand this academic year was like no other and understand why it had to be online. Luckily, we were provided with great resources that I definitely took advantage of – especially the Flourish tutorial videos and Omeka forums. The readings, especially those at the beginning of the semester, were really insightful in teaching me what DH actually is and those readings were also thought provoking, as they helped me think about problems in new ways – such as the unit on global humanities. While it can be (somewhat) straightforward to learn the methodology, theoretical frameworks are necessary to guide research projects and analysis. Through our readings and by looking through the examples provided each week, I was able to understand how and why a particular author approached a problem with digital methods – this really helped me grasp what I could do, or maybe should or shouldn’t do, with the methods we learned this semester.
When it came down to our grant writing assignment, I found this very challenging. I have never written a grant before and typically write to more forensic science audiences who are more interested in validation and error rates than in historical context, as is more aligned to humanities fields. This project really made me think about my dissertation research on bias in skeletal collections in the United States in a different way – and helped me identify how I could work to solve a problem that I was encountering, concerning hard to access resources, while I have been attempting to do background research this semester in preparation for my comprehensive exams. But this really was a new direction of research for me so I even sought the advice of two of my peers at MSU who study sociocultural anthropology to get their perspective and feedback on my grant project. I wanted to see if they understood my project without any prior knowledge on the topic at hand (i.e., biological anthropology methodology) and if they felt it was a viable idea based on their more humanities-aligned backgrounds.
I do now (after writing my grant proposal) really think that an online platform with information on the history of collections is missing and needed in the field of anthropology. And I would not even have thought of this project if I had not seen the examples we were provided of projects during the first week of the semester. They really helped me see how much the visualization of information can help with understanding and just how much information can be provided – an impossible feat in a scientific article or many books. And I had never encountered Omeka or programs like Flourish before I started this class, as all of my prior work has been in R/R Studio or ArcGIS. Working through each of the programs during the digital methods of the course really helped me see how different tools could be useful – either in general or to my grant project. In fact, I am planning to expand on my previous research in Text Analysis on a project this summer and hope to publish an article on it, as I really think biological anthropology could gain a lot through the inclusion of the methods we learned this semester.
I’m really glad I found and took this class this semester. While it was a really new experience for me and dealt with a lot of new ideas, I do feel like I learned so much about digital humanities, the methodology, and DH project implementation. I likely will not take up a digital humanities position in a department one day, but I hope to keep up to date on the research and new methodologies so I can use them within my own forensic or biological anthropology research.
