So this was my third DHSI; I did the TEI Fundamentals, Digital Editions, and Out-of-the-Box courses here. The obvious thing that I’ve gotten out of these courses is knowledge about fields and scholars I may otherwise never have encountered. I think my own future applications of DH are more ambiguous than the tangible knowledge I’ve gotten out of these classes. It’s a good kind of unsteady footing, learning new ways of doing things I’ve already done or I may want to do. The past week was “word frequency analysis,” which was brand new to me. I was thinking about some of the things I might do with it, but in broad, loose ways—most of the work we did in class was on the traits of individual authors or characters in novels, etc. One thing that I’d been thinking about, though, was the traits of authors over the course of their careers; how, for instance, might the letters of an author in his 20s compare to the letters he wrote in his 70s?
The other thing I’d been thinking about this week builds on what Emily talked in her post re: community building. There is, of course, a really beautiful community we’ve built through DHSI in and outside of classes. But the other thing I’ll pull out of DHSI is being able to bring some of the things that allow communities to take shape back to my home institution. Many of the undergraduates and graduate students I’ve taught know little or nothing about DH or DHSI, and so to build into my teaching ways of making my students more aware of such things…that’s really valuable for them and for me. I’m planning on bringing some of what I’ve made in-class here to the Intro to Lit Studies course I’m teaching next fall, just to show first-year students what DH is and what it can do. I’d be really interested to hear how other people might fold their DH knowledge into undergraduate survey classes or other courses.
So, thanks EMiC, thanks DHSI, thanks sauntering deer (who, after many failed experiments, turned out not to like carrots). Going to miss you all.