As Courtney mentioned last week, this year we’re making a concerted effort to get the fellows focused on their research from the beginning of the program. To that end, we set aside the first week and a half for learning about DH/DS with lots of focused individual research time as well, and everyone has been amazingly productive (more on that in a bit). The second week of DSSRF got underway on Monday with discussions about the values embedded in digital scholarship and digital humanities work. To help start our conversations, we read Lisa Spiro’s article “This Is Why We Fight”: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities, and had the fellows come up with their own lists of values for DH/DS.
Expanding on the question of values – and looking back to last week’s questions of “what is DH?”, “what isn’t DH?”, and “why DH?”, we also read and discussed the The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0. As we’ve done in years past, we gave the fellows time to create their own manifesto, and they amazed us with a brilliant piece of writing! The DSSRF 2019 Manifesto addresses the questions: “What is Digital Humanities? (to us)”, “What are our values?”, and “What are our hopes and ambitions for this summer program?” I can’t possibly pick one sentence that summarizes their statement, so you’ll have to read it for yourself.
On Tuesday, we took our first dip into looking at some tools – these ones chosen by the students, the only requirement being that they didn’t demonstrate something we would be learning later in the summer. Not surprisingly, everyone picked tools that focused on some sort of data visualization. We learned about Piktochart, RAWGraphs, Infogram, Netlytic, and Gephi. Props to Cassie for being brave enough to explore Gephi on her own!
Wednesday found us learning about basic video recording and editing from Wes Bernstein, our Instructional Technology Video Production Specialist. Several of our fellows may be conducting interviews as part of their projects this summer, so we wanted to give them the basic tools to do that, and we’re also assigning some video reflection posts this summer, to supplement (or in place of) written blogs. Bertrand Library recently opened the 2nd Floor Studio, an easy-to-use video studio with a fixed camera, lighting, and microphone. Wes walked us through the process of recording a video and then it was practice time for the students! We followed up with a short tutorial on video editing, and we’re eager to see the students’ first video blogs next week.
Friday we met for a discussion of the students’ project charters, portions of which are posted in the Week 2 reflections. The fellows have all been making great progress on refining their research questions, locating source materials, and thinking through the elements of what their finished projects will contain. We’re excited to see what they accomplish in the weeks to come!