Digital Humanities for All: Accessibility and Metacognition
A Portfolio of the Development of a Digital Humanist in English 480: Digital Humanities History and Methods
By Jane McGrail
I tend to be a linear thinker. I work well among lists, columns, and rows. My writing process generally begins with an outline and ends with a final draft. In a course on the history and methods of digital humanities this semester, I was challenged to move beyond the linear. I tend to be a somewhat risk-averse writer. In my work, I like having a plan, a system, and a vision for the final output. In this course on the history and methods of digital humanities during the spring of 2020, I was challenged to become an academic risk-taker. These challenges are, of course, not unrelated.
Digital Humanities work requires flexibility and risk-taking because it necessitates not only working but also thinking in different media. For each of the projects I composed during the course of the semester, I had to learn to eschew my notions of writing as a linear process, and instead think about how to shape what I was trying to communicate in terms of the medium of what I was trying to create. Digital humanities work raises questions about the efficacy of communication in print-based forms and about the relationship between audience and interface. Successful digital humanities projects use these considerations of audience and communication to inform their work—as I learned this semester, to make it both accessible and comprehensible.
Throughout the semester composing digital projects, I found myself thinking as both a student and an educator because of my role as a PhD student teaching first year-composition. I was attentive to how I was learning to communicate in digital spheres as well as to how thinking in new media renders it necessary to consider audience and genre throughout the composition process. The portfolio that follows showcases my work in English 480: Digital Humanities History and Methods throughout the semester. In it, I hope that you will see how I learned to think in different genres, to be flexible, and to take risks.
Step 1—Digital Humanities Project Report
Project Gutenberg's Freely Accessible eTexts
To become familiar with working in the digital humanities, I first completed a report on Project Gutenberg. I chose to focus on Project Gutenberg because I really appreciate the way the platform makes eTexts freely and immediately accessible. As a voracious reader, I find that I am always looking for ways to get ahold of more books. I frequently utilize the Libby by Overdrive app that most libraries offer to card-holders, but there are often wait times of over 6 months to get access to many titles. Project Gutenberg is unique among eText resources because there are no wait times or limits to the number of copies of the texts that exist in Gutenberg's database. Project Gutenberg digitizes public domain texts and makes them available to download or to read online with any software.
My report existed in two stages. First, I had to research a digital humanities project and write a report on it. I chose to report on Project Gutenberg because I was interested in thinking about the original form of today's eBook industry. I conveyed my research in the form of an imagined interview with the founder of Project Gutenberg. This format allowed me to convey information about the history of digital humanities in a fast-paced, easily comprehensible way that suited the goal of the composition more effectively than a traditional essay form. In the next phase of the assignment, I transformed my report into a video composition. Initially, I had a hard time imagining how to transmit the information in the video form and I was apprehensive about getting started with the process of creating a video composition because it required me to take risks and be flexible about the way I was communicating. You can see in this assignment that it was my first attempt at digital work and over the course of the semester as I have become more comfortable with composing in different media, my work has reflected my comfort level.
Reporting on Project Gutenberg served to germinate my thinking about digital humanities and access. Project Gutenberg is a digital humanities project with the underlying goal of making literature and resources accessible to as many people as possible. Completing this project helped my development as both a scholar and an educator. In the first-year writing class I teach, I ask my students to write a book review on any book of their choosing. This semester, when the novel coronavirus pandemic made it impossible for students to go to libraries or access books, I shared details about Project Gutenberg with them so that they could use it to get ahold of books.
Here you can see my the video I composed on Project Gutenberg, in which I recorded my imaginary interview with Michael Hart and recorded the possibilities of working within the eText site.
The process
Below are the constituent parts that underlie the final video composition. They are listed in the reverse of the order in which they were created with the expectation that you will be able to first watch the video and then move through each of these parts to understand that video composition is a process.
Video Transcript
Video Story Board and Script
Story report revision
Story report first draft
Composing this video encouraged me to engage critically with the relationship between genre and communication. At each stage, I had to think about how what I was trying to communicate was shaped by the way in which I was communicating it. When I teach first year writing, I ask students to think about how to write within the conventions of a particular genre, but as I was working on this video, I realized that thinking in new media makes this point a necessary consideration that becomes even more salient. Now that I have learned about the process of creating a video, I plan to ask my students next semester to create a video so that they can really grapple with the relationship between genre and audience in this way.
Step 2—Digital Humanities Controversy Podcast
Accessing the Digital Humanities: Digital, Public Humanities
This was my favorite of the three major projects we completed this semester. In it, I worked with my wonderfully insightful peers Carly Schnitzler, Isabelle Smith, and Natalie Perez to research and discuss the controversial issue of digital humanities work as insular. We each conducted research on the questions that interested us the most and then recorded a live podcast in class. Through this collaboration, I learned a lot about the ways in which digital humanities permeates various disciplines, which really served to reinforce the notions we discussed on the first day of class about the interdisciplinarity of the digital humanities and underscored how digital humanities is not really its own field because of the way it is suffused throughout so many fields.
As an aspiring public humanist, I found our discussions about open access, accessibility, and the possibilities for digital humanities work outside of the academy particularly relevant and useful for my own thinking. We sought to discuss the necessity of making digital humanities work publicly relevant and accessible and talked about various projects that exist in the digital humanities that are doing this work.
Like the video project, this podcast existed in multiple stages. After the live recording, we each had to edit that raw material to be about half as long. To accomplish this, I experimented with the audio editor software, Audacity, and with the Adobe suite version, Adobe Audition. I found Audacity glitchy on my 5-year old MacBook and lost multiple drafts of the podcast because of this before I turned to Adobe Audition, with which I was much more successful. I learned valuable skills about audio composition and editing and I enjoyed this process. I was very pleased with my group's live podcast so when I modified it for my own assignment, I didn't change much structurally and instead focused on eliminating some of the ancillary discussion but keeping the main thread of the conversation.
Continuing in the vein of thinking as both a student and a teacher during this class, I was also very excited about the podcast form because it makes it necessary to strive for concision and clarity in communication, without reliance on visual aids. When I teach first-year composition again next semester, I plan to ask my students to develop a podcast to encourage them to think about composition in terms of more than just words on a page and instead in terms of considering how best to communicate information to a specific audience most clearly and effectively.
The final product
Here is the edited version of the live podcast that I produced individually. In it, I focus on the relationship between the digital humanities and the public humanities.
The process
The process of creating the final podcast is perhaps more important than the podcast itself because it is through this process that I learned about the nature of the relationship between digital and public humanities and about the possibilities for communicating in audio compositions. The live recording of the podcast is linked here and above and the Google Docs we used to collaborate and compile our research are linked here.
Step 3—Experimenting with Portrait Videos and Pinterest
Pinterest: Digital Literacy, but Normativity
For the final project of the class, we conducted research on the relationship between Pinterest, data, and privacy. This project required us to scrape Pinterest in order to try to understand how the site uses data about identity to shape the kinds of information that it displays to users. We experimented with using the tall format to create a portrait-oriented video in Adobe Premiere Rush, further exploring the ways that media has a direct affect on communication. Using the tall format allowed me to depict the differences between the two accounts I created most immediately. Like all of our other assignments, this one encouraged me to consider the relationship between the medium in which I was composing and the information I was trying to convey. It was especially clear how changing the orientation of the video can change the possibilities for the message of the composition.
When I created the two Pinterest accounts I used for this project, I was most interested in considerations of gender and data for Pinterest users so I controlled for all of the other variables so that I could test only gender. I created two identities of the same age and location—one female and one male. Although it is likely that my computer stored some data which meant that the results were not as different as they might have been if I had used different computers, I still found notable differences between Pinterest gender.
In this video, my personal life and my academic life intersected in an exciting way because I have often found myself interested in the ways that Pinterest encourages normative behavior, particularly among women. Many of my friends use Pinterest to gain inspiration for moments in their lives from home decoration, to party themes, to birth announcements and I have always felt that I could tell when somebody sourced Pinterest for their ideas because everything has a very similar aesthetic. It was fascinating for me to be able to explore some of these things I have passively thought about in the past in a research-based, academic way.
Revision
Throughout the semester, our work emphasized the importance of process-based thinking. Part of this process is revision. It was helpful to think about my work as evolving because it gave me the freedom to try to be flexible in what I composed without worrying too much about perfection. I decided to revise my Pinterest video because I felt the most confident as I worked on developing this piece. By this point in the semester, I had a sense of how to approach a video composition and I was more comfortable translating my own voice as a writer into the piece. My revision focuses on making technical and aesthetic improvements to the piece, because that is an area in which there is still lots of room for development. As I completed this revision, I tried to work more on the technical and compositional aspects so that I'm communicating the information about Pinterest as effectively as possible and making full use of the possibilities of the tall video genre. I ran into difficulty with Adobe as I was revising my video, so I had to think creatively to come up with work arounds so that still allow the video to make better use of the possibilities of the medium.
The first draft
Improvisational Videos
The best way to learn is to do. This lesson was readily apparent to me as we completed short, fun projects like these two short filmm in class in order to practice and develop the techniques under discussion. By putting together the "We Learn Happiness" video, I learned how to use the screen recorder software, Snagit, to capture what is happening on my computer screen. Working on the "Haiku" video, I learned how to use Adobe Premiere Rush to compose a video in the tall format. Developing these skill would not have been possible if I had just watched or listened to a presentation on how to use Snagit and Adobe Premiere Rush. Instead, guided through the process as I worked on it on my own, I was able to develop and hone a skill upon which my other two video compositions in the course depended.
We Learn Happiness: A Short Film
I Miss the Snow: A Haiku
Participation
Reading Comments
Our first reading in the class this semester focused on the background and context of the Digital Humanities and addressed the fundamental question: "What is Digital Humanities?". I commented on this reading on our course website for January 14th.
Next, we read about theoretical scholarship in the digital humanities. My comment from January 21st is linked.
Week 3 of the course introduced us to methodologies in the digital humanities, of which there are many. I posted a comment about this reading for January 28th.
In February, we began a unit on video composition so our first reading of the unit served as an introduction to considerations of composing in video. Here is my comment on that reading from February 4th.
Moving through that unit, we continued to consider and discuss the relationship between humanities computing and multimedia scholarship, focusing particularly on how medium shapes communication. I commented on this reading for February 11th here.
Mid-February, we switched to our unit on audio compositions. Because our task for this unit was to record a podcast about a controversy in the digital humanities, we read a piece which focused on composing in audio modalities and a piece that addressed controversy in the digital humanities. My comment from February 18th is linked.
March was disrupted by the closure of campus due to the novel coronavirus pandemic so our reading schedule shifted slightly. At the end of the month, we moved into our final unit of the semester, focusing on data and privacy. Our first reading for this unit covered algorithms, persuasion, and coercion. I commented on this reading on March 31st.
Finally, out last set of readings for the semester supported our work on our Pinterest projects by addressing Pinterest and digital literacy. I posted my final reading comment for the class on April 7th.
Collaborative Efforts
The most successful digital humanities work is not conducted in isolation. For this reason, an important component of my work in this class involved collaboration. Although I ultimately produced each final product individually, the process of production depended heavily on peer involvement.
My first project, the video report on Project Gutenberg, began with a group sprint that required accountability among my small group in order for each of us to compose a successful project. We used Google Drive to share drafts, ideas, and works in progress, and to offer feedback to one another. This was especially useful in thinking through how to effectively communicate a project to an audience who may be unfamiliar with it.
The podcast project began as a group project, during which we chose to focus on insularity as a controversy in the digital humanities. We thoroughly researched questions of insularity in digital humanities work and discussed the ways in which various digital humanities efforts work to overcome these issues and thought through the possibilities for interrelationship among the digital humanities and the public humanities. Then, we revisited the group sprint model for collaboration to each produce an individual cut of the podcast we had recorded as a group. Again, Google Docs were especially useful as we collaborated throughout this process.
An essential part of collaboration is peer review, which underlies each of these projects in various implicit ways. I found it very helpful to my development throughout the course to both give and receive feedback. I commented on Emma's report on the evolution of word processors and I offered feedback to David's draft-in-progress for his DH report. Offering peer feedback was a valuable opportunity for me to gain insight into some best practices that I could utilize in my own work.
Step 4—Final Portfolio Video
Final Thoughts
Undergirding each of my three major projects from the course this semester are implied questions about digital humanities and access. As the semester evolved, I located my interest in digital work at the nexus of digital humanities and public humanities. Each of the projects I completed encouraged me to explore my interest in accessibility across various media, which I have highlighted throughout the portfolio. Throughout my work in the course, the combination of reading and composition tasks enabled me to locate my interests both theoretically and practically. After taking this course, I can confidently say that digital humanities work is most publicly accessible when it considers the ways in which the medium of composing intersects with the information being transmitted to prioritize the audience experience. I learned this when I worked on my first video and had to think about how to convey the information about Project Gutenberg without making a video that was overly heavy on narrative. I learned this when I worked on my podcast and dealt with concerns about how to convey information succinctly enough that an audience could follow it and get lost among the weeds of the conversation. And finally, I learned this when I worked on the Pinterest video and experimented with how the tall video format allows the audience to take in information on multiple planes, while also listening to the narration.
Meanwhile, as I worked on all of these projects, the importance of emphasizing process in digital humanities work become very clear to me. Each project involved many steps that built upon one another and required me to critically assess my own composition process. In digital work, process is emphasized because it is through metacognition that we are able to imagine how our work will intersect with the people reading it. When I teach first year composition, I try to emphasize metacognition by having my students reflect on their work frequently, but I rarely stopped and took that time for my own development. Focusing on the process of composing is its own metacognitive task that allowed me the space to stop and think about what I was learning and how I could use that information to make my work more accessible to a wide audience. By emphasizing metacognition as part of the process of working in the digital sphere, digital humanities opens up possibilities for all learners to benefit from its practices.
When I entered this class in January, I was not very confident in my digital literacy. I did not have internet service at my apartment and I never used much in the way of social media. I always felt like digital work was not for me, or like I just was not a digital person. In my first video, you can see and hear that I was nervous about my ability to adequately execute that kind of composition. In the podcast, I sound really shy. But by the Pinterest video, I began to feel more confident about my ability to parlay my own thoughts into the digital sphere and make decisions about how to communicate most effectively. English 480: Digital Humanities History and Methods has been deeply valuable to my development as both a scholar and an educator. Newly confident in my own ability as a digital humanist-in progress, next semester I will be teaching my first year composition students how to mobilize digital methodologies in service of effective communication.