Final Reflection

            Part of what interested me so much about this class initially was the overlap between a few areas of my academic interests. The intersection between material culture, long durée historical thought, and the digital humanities seemed like a great way to expand my experience in all three fields while also taking what looked like a frankly enjoyable class spring term. Even amidst the switch to online, daily struggles of shelter in place, and other challenges that assaulted our shared goal of enjoying this course, I still feel like I gained a lot from this term. Funnily enough though, it wasn’t in the areas I necessarily expected to grow. I likely should have expected that between this course and one I was in on Irish literature, I was going to learn more about literature and literary theory, but looking back it’s still slightly surprising that what feels like the most lasting impacts on my scholarly life have been outside of my primary discipline (which is a great ad for the DGAH program’s interdisciplinary nature if nothing else). 

            Part of this shift in learning might have come from the fact that I took Austin’s Hacking the Humanities class last term. Coupled with intro CS, winter term was a time when I was thinking a lot about digital methodologies like using WordPress and presenting ideas in a public forum. Looking even further back, I’d worked with twine in the English Workhouse class Austin co-taught my freshman year. These prior experiences made it so that as I was working on the remediation assignment and putting together the e-portfolio, I wasn’t trying to learn the software as much as I was thinking about the ways they could be used to demonstrate editorial theory. 

            Similarly, on the historical front, despite the fact that I found the history of print publication fascinating, I don’t think I’m going to be drawn too far away from the social bent that my personal academic research has contained over my time at Carleton.  Rather, I feel like the ideas that have made the most lasting impact on me are the discussions of how editions are produced and remediated, as well as their usefulness when presented and edited in a collaborative setting. 

            I feel, in part, that these ideas will stick the most strongly because of the way I have been and will be able to implement them right away. Through the demo edition project, I feel like I had a chance to use WordPress to grapple with the concerns of creating an edition and an archive that would make sense to a user but also draws on the theoretical frameworks that we’ve spent so much time talking about. Additionally, as I prepare to do some work with professors Joe Lowenstein and Doug Knox over the summer, I feel like I’m well situated to bring to bear the combined digital/historical/editorial perspective that we’ve tried to cultivate in this class through not only the short assignment with EarlyPrint, but also the discussions of how books and manuscripts are produced that occupied the beginning of term. 

            While I enjoyed the class meetings and larger projects in their own right, I think that the weekly homework assignments created a space where I was able to work through questions about the editorial process that wouldn’t have come up otherwise. One really clear example of the effectiveness of this learn-by-doing approach was the several-pronged way in which we used the homework assignments to build to the final demo-edition. Through practice with remediation, transcription, textual visualization, and even the final edition proposal, I got a good sense of the way in which developing an edition is a stepwise process that asks a series of diverse questions in order to get at the final generative process. 

            I hope that I can take the idea of creating and using editions forward from this course in a way that informs the historical questions I consider, all while continuing to grow more experienced with the digital methods we’ve used in this course.