What insights do you have about working in digital public humanities as a result of this experience? What new questions or ideas do you have as a result of this experience?
These are useful questions. What I did not appreciate a year ago was how much work it takes to keep up with DH technology. Historians have to read history journals and attend conferences to keep up with the field. But that stuff has as much to do with academic fashion as it does with the material itself. It’s useful to know something about pandemics in early modern England, for example. But it’s even more useful to know that that’s what fellow scholars are writing, talking, and therefore offering research stipends about.
With DH that’s different. Journals do exist, and conferences no doubt meet–with ever-increasing frequency, I imagine. But at the heart of staying in the know is the tech itself, not thoughts about it. It’s therefore empirical in a way that Humanities scholarship isn’t. This is what I’ve seen, at least, through my tiny window into the Library of Congress’s DH wing. They use an outmoded version of ESRI’s Story Maps, a minor platform that nonetheless reflects a broader dilemma for folks in the public sector: the government is too slow to keep up with IT. Businesses face the problem, to be sure, and therefore are eager to hire folks who are able and willing to keep up with the new stuff.
So to rest on your laurels in DH is a bad decision. It takes an interest in tracking the new features, templates, etc. So while I knew this in the abstract a year ago, my internship has shown it in practice–how much time and effort it takes to stay in the know. That’s what I wanted most from this program–to get to know IT in practice, as it relates to Humanities teaching and scholarship.
