Fellowships Are Temporary but DH Is Forever

I just finished my time in the Praxis fellowship, a year-long program that introduces PhD students to the various aspects of digital humanities. We concluded the program by presenting on all of our various projects that we worked on throughout the year. Leaving Praxis is hard for many reasons: where will I ever find a group of four other PhD students that I love to work with so much? How can I ever have so much fun in a classroom again? And where am I supposed to go to get my weekly little bowl of cheese that Jeremy Boggs would often provide?

While my structured time in the Scholars’ Lab is over, I realize that I now see potential DH projects wherever I go. A former Praxis fellow asked, during our final presentation, how we would want to expand on our hackathon project that analyzed the 1913-1934 issues of UVa’s satirical newspaper The Yellow Journal. I responded that I would like my cohort to present our poster at a conference and maybe even turn it into an exhibition. The month-long hackathon was hopefully only just the beginning of using digital humanities methods to engage with questions of satire and anonymity.

Brandon and I have also briefly discussed working on a DH project about the reality competition TV show Survivor. As noted in my previous blog post, I am unfortunately a huge fan of Survivor and treat every season like it’s my personal March Madness with weekly watch parties and a competitive bracket. Since the main game mechanism of Survivor is “tribal council” where someone is voted off the island every week, tracking voting stats (and stats in general) has become a huge part of being a fan of the show. For example, fans will count how often a player voted with the majority in order to determine how well they’re playing the game. Players are also judged by how many collective days they’ve been on the island, with Boston Rob lasting 152 days over 5 seasons and Parvati Shallow lasting 149 days over 4 seasons. There’s even an entire subreddit called r/Edgic (or “editing logic”) dedicated to figuring out who the winner of a season is based on how much screen time they’re edited to have and what music plays in the background of their confessionals.

There is seemingly an endless supply of “data,” including the transcripts of all 597 episodes of Survivor, to use for DH projects. I think back to one of our first text analysis assignments during Praxis: writing a code that could read the text of Much Ado About Nothing and track the total number of lines said by the two main characters, Benedick and Beatrice. That lesson could easily be applied to the transcripts of the Survivor episodes: how much more are men talking in each season? Does this change over time? Do winners speak the most? How do numbers of confessionals relate to who is voted out?

Aside from those projects that are very far outside of my own area of research, I also have been thinking about how DH informs my art historical research and intervenes in exhibition spaces. Back in November, I went to New York City on a marathon 24-hour trip to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The highlight of the trip was the Whitney’s exhibition Edges of Ailey that celebrated the life and work of the dancer Alvin Ailey (1931-1989). I was attended the exhibition on a Friday evening when tickets are free and the museum is open until 10pm. The pleasantly crowded and dimly lit gallery space filled with pumping music almost resembled a nightclub instead of a museum. Above the selections of paintings, sculptures, and archival materials, there were several performance recordings projected onto the wall in a frieze that ran around the perimeter of the room. As I walked around the gallery, I thought about how much of this multimedia exhibition was made possible through DH work. It’s difficult to capture the legacy of a dancer in a space usually reserved for static materials, but the curators used timelines and data visualizations to draw connections between the wide range of displayed objects. It was clearly effective; I’ve never seen the Whitney so packed with people from every demographic (even on other free Fridays).

My current research is about Indigenous Australian video installations and performance pieces. Displaying these dynamic works in traditional gallery spaces requires a different type of intermedial design and curation. I think that DH work is the answer to a lot of the issues that multimedia installations pose. DH has the power to transform the museum space from an archive into an intercultural experience.

I am nervous about publishing this post because what if I don’t follow through on any of these projects, and this post acts as documentation of my failed aspirations? But I guess that isn’t the point… this post is about how Praxis made me think about everything through a DH lens, leading me to new questions that I wouldn’t have thought to ask before. Now every time I watch Survivor I have Brandon Walsh’s voice in my head saying “our next project awaits!”