I decided not to propose my DH project, so I am ready to be a collaborator on one of the project teams.
Research + Digitization: I have a disciplinary background in history, which has allowed me to work in traditional research methodologies. I’ve worked on research projects that have had strong historical underpinnings, such as looking at the geopolitical ramifications of Non -Aggression Pact of 1939 in Eastern Europe. I’ve worked on all types of colonial history and black identity projects. If your project requires digging into digital databases, archives, libraries, and cultural institutions to find particular source material, I can help. If you need to write through a historical lens, I can contribute those skills. However, I want to do more than contribute skills I already have. I want to learn new skills in research. I want to learn the tools of digitization, audio, visual, textual and otherwise. Digitization which is a process that DHers often use to reproduce materials and expand their accessibility to other researchers. I want to learn the fine skills of working with OCR to translate print material into machine readable material, which is enormously important to anyone working in the humanities, if you want to export that data to do any sort of computational text analysis. I want to learn how to organize a digital repository or archive.
Outreach + SEO: I’ve previously worked in digital marketing where I optimized upward of 7000 pieces of jewelry for a small business. We had a multi-pronged strategy through social media activity, digital advertising, and search engine optimization to get customers to our website. As a result, I have some skills optimizing pages through meta data, links, keywords, and creating social media attention for our products. Not only that, I also edited materials in Photoshop for our campaign and online placements. I definitely want to learn newer skills in online marketing to make sure our projects get the public reach it deserves.
Project management + Team leadership: I’ve certainly served as team leader and a team member. Most often, I opt to be a collaborator. If I feel that I know enough about how the project should work, I would be enthusiastically choose to be a project manager but I generally don’t like to take roles where I don’t have much expertise. It will certainly have to depend on the project.
Coding + Programming: one of the most important roles that will be part of every project is the programmer role. I have close to zero experience in that capacity. I would like to work closely whoever is in that role since my chief objective in taking this class is to learn more about coding in general.