What am I Using?: Interning at the Smithsonian #6
From going from my traditional coursework with the George Mason Digital Public Humanities certificate track, I learned so many skills and mindsets about creating Digital Humanities projects. One of the biggest I would say might be the idea that in Digital Humanities, there are so many different ways to find new understandings about research and just as many different ways to display that information to the public.
In my work with the Smithsonian, I have primarily been conceptualizing and creating digital products that are meant to compliment the existing trunks in a way that does not unnecessarily repeat information or ways of learning. So far that has consisted of creating two ArcGIS Storymaps with wildly different presentations, and I’ve begun on my 3rd project of a planned 4. The third project deviates even further from the previous two as I am conceptualizing an activity on AI and intellectual property, where students will critically analyze an essay written by AI to see the current pitfalls of the technology and learn about the importance of citations in order to protect intellectual property and avoid plagiarism.
Prior to my work with the Smithsonian, I knew what Storymaps and ChatGPT were, but I had never used either in an Academic setting. While it’s always a little anxiety inducing to try something for the first time, my work with DPH through the program made it so that I wasn’t terrified of trying something new when I thought it would achieve the results that I wanted. With support from the certificate, I’ve started to grow confidence in my ability to learn a wide variety of methods of analysis and display. While it’s helpful for this internship with the Smithsonian, it’s starting to seep into other aspects of my life. For instance during my first semester of my certificate coursework I got to sample tons of different types of DH, and I had such a hard time getting mapping to click for me. I think I even wrote something along the lines of: I can see how mapping is interesting and useful to some, but the learning curve is something I am struggling to move past and enjoy so that I can reap the benefits of mapping skills. Yet back in the spring I volunteered for a sub-project with my job on the Bills of Mortality project with RRCHNM, and even mentioned that I thought this project would be really cool with a heat map, and now I’m working on creating heat-maps for twenty-four years of history and I’m gonna be presenting this project at AHA in January.
While I feel like I’ve been much better at computers than my peers growing up, there came a point where I assumed I wasn’t all that good with computers since I wasn’t fluent in any coding language. But the certificate program has helped me to understand that coding is only part of all the amazing technical skills you can have for DPH, and that it’s simpler to pick up new skill sets than you fear. (I could probably pick up a code language or two if I really had the time).
