In the Digital Humanities, there is a lot of talk about digital projects. But what exactly is a digital project?
I came to this question while browsing through some of my old sites. One that’s still online is my Frida Kahlo site. I put this back up because it is one of the most consistently hit pages on my site. It is a digital project of sorts- a little collection of Frida Kahlo images, a little bit from her diary, and a biography. When I made this (in high school, please excuse the horrible HTML and proofing) I had visions of greatness. I was going to transcribe her diary, bring in collaborators who could speak Spanish and help me transcribe, write a huge and in depth biography. In the end, the project just didn’t go much of anywhere. I was just a high school student, back then there wasn’t a lot of interest in Frida Kahlo (the movie wasn’t out, and only a few biographies existed.)
The funny thing is, looking back on this tiny project, I see a lot of similarities to digital work today. The issues I faced with foreign language characters (which I never quite resolved) are still an issue, though we have more sophisticated and standard ways of dealing with them. I dealt with how to display the transcribed text, and was never satisfied with the result. I struggled with design. I thought about navigation. Later, I wondered about and dealt with migration. Obviously, at 17 I didn’t have everything figured out, but it’s interesting to me that some of the fundamental problems of digital projects are pretty similar.
Also interesting to me is the desire to make a digital project. I wouldn’t have called this a digital project back then- it was just a project, a web page, a fun way to spend my time. It was originally connected to a home page (now lost) on which I had a blog of sorts, which was mainly a place for me to put things I’d collected. In essence, my web presence was a digital project- I was trying to accurately portray who I was, or who I wanted to be, or at least what image I wanted to present to the world. The Frida Kahlo site was a part of that. I suppose the drive to make a website, digital project, whatever, is the same as the drive to write a book, make a painting, etc. It’s sort of refreshing to think back to the 17 year old me, who just wanted to make something. Even if it was small, and incomplete, it was there- and it still gets a lot of hits to this day. I didn’t spend a lot of time agonizing over details, I just made it.
Scholarly Digital Projects, of course, need more than this. In order to preserve the data, make the site future proof, and create a site with scholarly authority, things like markup and data structure and metadata and file types must be considered. It is important. But I’d like to find a way to capture the spontaneity of “oooo, isn’t this cool!” discoveries while keeping the scholarly aspects of the site. One way I can think of to do this is to work with a Center like ours. This way, a scholar can have ideas, and we can do the best we can to implement them. The more sites we do, the easier it gets (right?). However, not every scholar has access to a center like ours, and even in digital humanities centers some projects come along where we just don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
Another way to keep some of the spontaneity is to build the site using software that allows for this kind of thing. When I was building my Frida Kahlo site, I would have loved something like WordPress to power it. Scholarly sites – at least object driven scholarly sites – can now use Omeka. Though it is still pretty new, it shows a lot of promise for getting projects out there quickly. More of these tools will pop up, and eventually, we may not need to develop a custom framework for every project. Of course, the bigger projects will, but there are plenty of smaller projects that wouldn’t need to mess with hand coding, etc. My dream is that we’ll eventually have transcription systems that can generate needed markup and feed right into an Omeka-like program for display. There will also be the ability to add contents, easily invite and add collaborators, and tie projects together. and, of course, the search mechanisms will be awesome. (Software is pretty cool in my dreamland of a brain.)
Someone told me recently that they thought all this money going into tools is a bit of a waste. I disagree. Though there are many similar projects right now, that is the kind of activity is what is needed to come up with the best solution. Only time will tell if it will work.
Incidentally, this post is pretty timely because the “Tools for Data-Driven Scholarship” invitation only meeting, co-hosted by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM) and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), starts today. Although the meeting is invitation only, the site is open to all, and it links to some nice resources.