I began my Digital Humanities path almost by accident. As a good Liberal Arts student, when I first arrived at Carleton, I set about exploring all that our curriculum had to offer, discovering in the process so many strategies for reading, interpreting, and analyzing the world around me. In Cinema and Media Studies courses like Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Film History, I learned how to read and interpret filmic media for not only overt themes and messaging, but also the implicit biases and beliefs of creators; in Introduction to Statistics I learned the basics of data analytics, the power of these strategies, and also how easily they can be misinterpreted or misrepresented; and in Introduction to Computer Science and Data Structures I learned the building blocks of the digital world in which we now reside and the skills to use those blocks towards an infinite number of creations.
However, despite all of this exploration, my true love remained the same; history. I’ve always loved studying the past. Since my earliest days traversing historical societies and museums with my likeminded grandfather, I have found the powerful sense of understanding the world around me that is instilled through historical education to be the most intoxicating type of knowledge. It had been my dream to pursue a life of historical research and writing before I ever arrived at Carleton, and the wonderful History courses that I have taken while here have only reinforced that dream.
However, all of my exploration was not for naught. One thing that some of my most beloved History courses exposed me to was the wonderful range of Digital History projects that exist. From Centering Spenser’s VR recreation of Kilcolman Castle to Shahzad Bashir’s A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (which remains my favorite piece of digital scholarship), these classes exposed me to the wonderful possibilities for combining traditional historical scholarship with the new technological tools and interdisciplinary approaches that I had been developing in my non-History coursework. It was this realization that inspired me to pursue the Digital Arts & Humanities minor at Carleton.
The first step on this journey was the minor’s core class, Hacking the Humanities. This course taught me the foundations of Digital Humanities research and tools through its structure of small projects. In weekly labs, I learned the basics of everything from ArcGIS Online to Georeferencing to 3D modeling. It was a wonderful ten weeks of exploration that confirmed my desire to continue with this then-novel approach to humanistic inquiry, research, and presentation. And, at the end of it all, I was able to work with a group to complete my first ever full Digital Humanities project, a digital history of Carleton’s literary societies. Below is a (still beginner’s) 3D model of a paddle used to beat first-years by the Adelphic Society:
This website brought together my extensive training in narrative history and my new skills of website design and 3D modeling to present my college’s past in a new way, and perhaps give it a broader reach. At it’s completion, I was ready and excited to build on these skills further in future Digital Humanities courses!