I really enjoyed my digital scholarship summer research fellowship experience. We learn something new everyday and form a clear sense of what digital scholarship is over the past 8 weeks. DH is an open, diverse, and collaborative platform. It encourages collectiveness and community. The instructors in the program embrace every new perspective and support any experimentation. At the beginning of the program, I had little confidence and was not sure if my ideas are good enough. Courtney and Carrie and my peers created an environment that was very supportive and safe. We shared our knowledge across disciplines and valued any kind of feedback as well as criticism. I enjoyed listening to others’ ideas during the meetings, and were willing to share any thoughts in mind.
The library specialists taught us how to use digital tools in our research. Tableau was useful for visualizing the data and transform them into a more straightforward form. It helped me understand the data I collected for historical . It was hard to see the trends directly from the menu data set. Voyant made my research more easily to read and more visually appealing. TimelineJS helped me organize the historical events chronologically. StoryMap put the interviews together. After learning those tools, I was able to envision the end product of my project at the end of the fifth week.
Besides learning different tools, we had the opportunity of visiting Lafayette and Gettysburg to meet with other students in the digital scholarship program this summer. It was very interesting to see what others had done with the digital tools we learned about. People from other schools gave us helpful feedback for improvements. I was nervous about sharing my project in front of a large audience before the visits. The experience of presenting our own projects at other schools built up my confidence. The more I practice, the more comfortable I feel during presentation.
In conclusion, the Digital Scholarship Student Research Fellowship program introduces us to many efficient ways of conducting a research. Through learning, I discover methodologies to organize sources and ways of visualizing data in a novel perspective. The process of creating a project is open, participatory and networked, therefore communication and collaboration are very important. We value “diversity” because it makes our projects more vibrant and our statements stronger. Most importantly, we value failures. We acknowledge that digital humanities is an expanding new field, and we can learn from any failure along the way of exploration.
My project will be preserved online. I hope that my experiences with digital scholarship program would encourage more people to join this new way of conducting researches. This is the link to my website: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/chinese-food-in-the-us/index