“You know, I just don’t care about the digital humanities,” I said to a friend outside a coffeeshop on a sunny summer day in 2016. “I just don’t get computers and I don’t think they can help me with my research.” At the time, I never would have guessed that I would enroll in the Digital Studies and Methods Seminar, DSAM 3000/LIS 3600, two years later, nor the ways that digital tools would impact my academic process both with and without computers. In this post, I’m going to summarize the key things I learned after a year entrenched in digital humanities research. First, it’s important to highlight that my feelings about computing spawned more from ignorance, fear, and lack exposure than any rational basis.

Before enrolling in the DSAM seminar, I walked by the Visual Media Workshop in the Frick Fine Arts building on a daily basis. I imagined my friends and colleagues on their computers, staring at a stream of numbers and letters that very much resembled a scene from “The Matrix.”

This is to say that using computers to ask research questions was unthinkable to me at that point in my graduate career: I simply had no idea what they were actually doing in there and the limitations of a computer’s assistance.

But it wasn’t as if my research was going entirely smoothly, either. In my research, there was a complex network of people, places, objects, and representations that I saw repeated across time and space. I tried Excel sheets and massive Word documents, but neither of these tools allowed me to flexibly organize and visualize the connections that I was trying to explain.

Flash forward to the fall semester of my seventh year of graduate school: my dissertation project’s connective threads had only grown stronger, but I had no way of visualizing them; the images I collected over months of archival research were overloading my computer; my research was still haphazardly spread out across my computer. Because I was nearing the end of my graduate student career, I wanted to take advantage of the all the opportunities that Pitt had to offer; it was also my chance, once and for all, to learn what digital humanities was all about. 

The year of DH coursework was, without a doubt, one of the best and most formative experiences of my graduate career. While it is immensely challenging to summarize all of the ways that digital tools have helped me personally, here are some key takeaways and, most important, reasons why you should give the digital humanities a shot:

1. You’re probably already a digital scholar, you just don’t realize it. When I made the inflammatory comment above, my laptop, which sat in front of me, was running a combination of Microsoft Word, Zotero, and Gallica (the digital repository of the French National Library). This is to say that I was already a digital scholar, but I had a very narrow idea of what it meant to use technology for my historical research. If you’ve ever word searched a document, accessed an online repository, or written a Word document, you’re already a digital humanist.

2. Reflexivity and process are just as important as a finished project. Students in the DSAM courses are obligated to keep a “mindful practice” journal, where they track their reflections, stumbling blocks, successes, and failures. It is a place for them to be honest with themselves and to translate the digital work that they’ve done into writing. Now, this may sound tedious, but it’s truly a way for students to think not only about non-linear progress but also about time management.

3. It’s okay to ask for help. As I’ve discussed in a previous blog post, scholarly work is often isolating. When imposter syndrome strikes, it can be challenging to reach out to others and admit that you don’t know something. But in the DSAM courses, none of the Humanities students were experts in computing. Far from it, in fact. I was lucky to be part of an outstanding and interdisciplinary cohort of young scholars, all of whom were willing to talk out ideas, ask hard questions, and be vulnerable. Though a few of my peers had taken computer science courses in high school, that was pretty much the extent of our collective body of knowledge. We were in the “unknown” together and we were stronger for it. Admitting you don’t know something, especially in academia, is something that requires practice and I am certainly well versed in it now, for the better.

4. Experimentation, play, and curiosity are fundamental to successful projects. Throughout my graduate school career, some of the most exciting “a-ha!” moments have come from stepping outside of my disciplinary comfort zone. the exact same statement can be applied to my work as a digital historian. 2019 is a really exciting moment for the digital humanities: there are plenty of software programs out there, each with their own strengths, limitations, and quirks. Using them not only shows you the limitations of your thinking but also the assumptions you’ve made about your project. By using different software, and trying out new ones, I was able home in on the key questions that my research project sought to answer and, moreover, find space to implement new tools or evidence down the road.

5. Digital tools are not the “end all be all” of the humanities. I mean this in two ways: first, it is unlikely that a digital tool exists that will fit all of your needs. Software that helps you organize your research while you’re writing will not be the same set of tools you will need to engage an audience in a public forum. Second, the computer is nothing without an expert who knows what types of questions to ask. For a humanist, the computer’s strength is that it can organize a lot of information and it can search through that information quickly. But it will not find ‘evidence’ unless you ask for it. So, although the computer can swiftly find data, it is up to you, the researcher, to do something meaningful with the what is returned.

The Association for Computers and the Humanities is holding their conference in Pittsburgh this summer from July 23-26!

Thank you for following along this year and be sure to stay in touch – I’m always happy to chat or answer any questions!

Kylie R.J. Seltzer 
PhD Candidate | Department of the History of Art and Architecture 
Graduate Student Assistant | "Humanities Careers" Project 
@KylieRJSeltzer | kylieseltzer@pitt.edu