Throughout my education, theoretical and technical rigor has taken center stage. I am increasingly grateful for my solid foundation in research across humanities disciplines and the mental organization that I've developed while writing academic papers and giving presentations. Carefully citing scholars and employing academic jargon has been my student persona for a while. As I further entrench myself in the humanities, I've been desperately on the lookout to diversify this persona and instill elements of creativity.
Outside academia, I've spent countless hours working on artistic activities ranging from watercolor painting to singing to cooking, but the metaphorical creative itch could not be scratched. Separating academics from creativity has been an expectation that I recognized in high school and followed for fear of not being accepted into higher education institutions. My introduction to Digitial Humanities through the DEFCon Fellowship has been an eye-opener. DH presented itself as a place where creativity is not only accepted but also valued. As I look back on the semester, I can say with confidence that this fellowship gave me the space to merge creativity with pure academic research.
Prior to working as a Student Fellow with DEFCon, I had also resisted entering the digital world for fear of being forced to leave my humanities at the door. Coming from a family cultural background where Computer Science and other IT subjects rarely cross over with the humanities, I was hesitant to think about acquiring skills such as coding or website design. I was worried that the further I entered the digital world I’d have to abandon studying history, creative writing, archaeology, and anthropology.
There is a certain relief that I feel through my exposure to the Digital Humanities and DEFCon. It is a relief that precedes the excitement of possibilities. To put it simply, I am glad that I was wrong about the sacrifices of entering the digital world. Through the workshops, team project meetings, and DH talks I was exposed to the potential that this space has. Now that the semester has ended, I can walk away with two important ideas: first, that a creative digital expression of research is as legitimate as a traditional paper, and second, that the digital world and humanities subjects are compatible.
In the spirit of recognizing how rewarding this fellowship has been in changing my worldview, I have curated a few items to share my progress and learnings. The first item is my reflections on the Spicing Academia project in collaboration with DEFCon Faculty Mentors. I chose to focus on aspects of visual storytelling, collaboration, and the general process. The second item is a discussion of my experience with open-access tools and my project from the LatinX Digital Humanities workshop. Here, I chose to feature snippets of my StoryMapJS project. The other items are a brief look at projects I made for other classes this semester and beyond that incorporate tools such as Canva, AI image generation, and digital capturing of my art. I chose to include projects outside of the DEFCon fellowship to share how my learning is not contained to the fellowship workshops.
Looking to the future, I am very keen to incorporate tools such as StoryMapJS and TimelineJS as well as editing/design software like BeFunky and Canva to provide a visually interesting component to my Graduate studies presentations. I am also working on my Graduate Project and intend to present my research specifically using digital tools so that I can convey ethnographic information in a multimedia manner. So much of ethnographic research is about the sensorial experience as well as individual life stories. Using the StoryMapsJS prototype project that I am working on for the Spicing Academia project, I intend to build on that by learning how to use ArcGIS StoryMaps for my final graduate project.