- 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?
I have now almost completed two internships for my digital humanities certificate, one in traditional digital communications at The Health Museum and one in digital humanities at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Both experiences taught me that change is constant in this field. New software, social media marketing, and research methods are constantly emerging. Digital humanities can be like computer science in that it is constantly evolving. It can include anything from podcasting for public education to creating computer databases of historical data for researchers.
Specializing in one area of digital humanities can limit your career options. Learning textual analysis, website building, podcasting, and transcription software will expand your skills and knowledge. It is also important to be open to constant change in the field and to be willing to educate the public in new ways. Learning how to use Omeka and WordPress is a gateway to other easy-to-use website builders. Solitary work, while common in traditional history writing, is uncommon in museum work, science communication, and digital humanities projects. From my museum internship,the working on podcast was to improve community building around health and education. For the current internship, datascribe, hugo and github tools and platforms can enable scholars, and researchers to collaborate on projects and share resources and knowledge. This can help to create a more inclusive and diverse public humanities landscape and promote the co-creation of knowledge.
I’ve come up with some new ideas from my experiences. I want to learn better how to promote public engagement and tailor digital projects that educate about history that is less known and, in some areas of the country, being actively suppressed, like enslaved histories or gender history. How can we use digital public humanities to reach even more people? I want to focus on how to engage the general public. Digital humanities projects are many, and the engaging ones include visual graphics, interactive pieces, blogs, and yet many are for an academic audience and unseen by the public. With the assault on history education, how can digital humanities fill that knowledge gap that will occur in states hampered by political suppression of this knowledge? The two very different internships show the reality of trying to convey knowledge in the vast sea of information on the internet and make available, accessible large databases for further education to the public.
