After a few weeks of being encouraged to start a blog or reflect on the process of creating this IS, I decided that it would be a good idea to at least start to write my thoughts down before I am able to post them online. The purpose of posting them on my blog would be to allow people to what the IS process looks like, from both the perspective of historical research and the perspective of a student.
Thus far, I have been exploring the world of digital history, and how historians have used digital history to help them research and to help them present their work in new ways. From the perspective of someone who knows a lot about the presentation side of digital history, but not the digital research side of things, it was interesting to see how broad digital history can be. It made me a bit nervous that most sources on digital history spent more time talking about digital research methods, such as machine learning, finding words and phrases in primary texts, creating metadata, and more, but I was eventually able to find resources that also talked about more of the “outputs.” For my purposes, I wanted to find other examples of digital history that were more interested in using digital methods to get their information out there, not just to write a traditional paper. I’m not doing digital history for digital history’s sake, but I’m using digital methods to accomplish a larger goal, which is to make sure that people can access my work. Basically, I’m trying to transform a piece of local history into a piece of academic history, to then turn that academic history back into public/local history.
The other thing that I am trying to do with the digital method is to reach out to tribal nations in order to ensure that my work is not only acceptable to the College, that it is acceptable to those that it’s about. Building relationships with groups like the Wyandot is rewarding, but there’s also an element of stress. I want to make sure that I’m thinking about what I am saying and asking, and that I am being sensitive. In my research consultation with Denise Monbarren on Friday 9/9, I expressed some frustration and worry that some of the tribal nations that I contacted didn’t get back to me. However, there could be a lot of reasons why they didn’t get back to me, and I still have time to reach out to them again. I’m glad that I took the time to reach out over the summer, but still it is likely that my emails were just not seen, or that they were tossed aside because I was a random person. Overall, I’m trying not to see these interactions in a transactional light, it’s problematic to view collaboration as just “checking a box.” If collaboration is not welcome, it is simply not welcome.