Using My Skills to Excel
My name is Gramond McPherson, I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History. I am a late-era millennial which provides me a vantage point of remembering the world before high-speed internet and smartphones while coming of age as these technologies became a normal way of life.
As a kid, I developed and learned technical skills that I have continued to use as an adult. For instance, in middle school, I learned how to type in a computer class. The teacher required the use of an orange keyboard cover that hid the keys from our view. Though difficult at first, this practice helped to develop my muscle memory in learning to type without looking down at the keyboard. Today, I continue to be proficient in typing because of the exercise of the orange keyboard cover. I also remember the pre-digital way of conducting research, relying on encyclopedias and books and using index cards to take notes. As a millennial, while I can find solutions to problems and complete tasks in both digital and non-digital ways, I am grateful for the technologies that exist to make my life easier and less complex. As a graduate student, I am especially grateful for Zotero which I have used for over a decade. This digital tool has made my research and writing process of generating citations and collecting bibliographical material more efficient and seamless.
Beyond technical skills, the non-technical skills that I either inherited or gained through experience have also served me well as I have matured. I have always been somewhat of an introverted person, though I can become more outgoing once I am comfortable within a social space. While some could perceive this as a disadvantage within collaborative spaces like the Praxis Program, I would argue the opposite. For me, being an introvert is less about how much I talk and more about what I choose to say or not say. Through my experiences in school, I sought to make my words count and think critically rather than simply seeking to hear my own voice. I also believe that being an introvert makes me a better listener, which is also a valuable skill for collaborative work. Lastly, being an introvert allows me to have greater attention to detail, including seeing the moods of people. As the Praxis cohorts are generally small, these conditions are perfect for an introvert like me to excel in.
As a humanist, particularly in the field of history, the most important skill I use is critical thinking. In thinking about history, I am not simply seeking to know about notable events or important people in isolation, but to answer the who, what, why, where, and how. These questions help me to gain a greater understanding of a historical period as well as become more conscious of the silences or historical gaps that exist concerning issues like race, gender, and sexuality. I hope to bring my critical thinking skills to engage with the digital humanities. As evident by the readings in Week 2 of Praxis, these debates on hegemony and silences are occurring within the digital humanities as well.
One of my goals for Praxis is to embrace the unknown. Coming into Praxis, I had some prior exposure to digital humanities. During my time at the University of Central Florida, I completed the requirements to earn a certificate in Geographic Information Systems which involved taking four classes, two classes that provided scholarly and theoretical introductions to digital humanities and two classes that introduced me to ArcGIS and allowed me to create a project using the software. Yet, even with this training and certification, there is still a part of me that feels inadequate and on a scale from novice to expert, I feel closer to being a novice than an expert.
Presently, I feel even more inadequate regarding Coding. For instance, in completing the objectives from the Week 1 Code Lab, in preparing my Development Environment, I faced difficulty on the first task in installing Homebrew due to some issues I was having in Terminal. However, in viewing research and problem-solving as valuable skills, I was determined to find a solution. In embracing equal credit from prior Praxis charters, I am thankful to YouTube, particularly the EasyOSX Channel’s video on installing Homebrew for helping me through that task. This semester, I am sure there will be other unknowns that I will encounter, and I hope that I will lean into the resources available, whether my Praxis cohort, the Scholars Lab, or others, to succeed this year.
Lastly, something that I hope to discover during this Praxis year is the technical skills that I already possess but have not been utilizing to my fullest potential. An example of this is using ArcGIS again after a nearly three-year hiatus. By then, the use of ArcGIS had expanded into using ArcGIS Online, which required some further adjustment. Yet, while ArcGIS had evolved, some of the technical skills that had remained dormant during my hiatus came back to me and I was able to succeed in completing various scholarly projects. In embracing the unknown, just as the orange keyboard cover helped develop my muscle memory to become proficient in typing, the setbacks I will face in becoming comfortable with the skills I will learn with the Praxis program will help to develop my muscle memory and with practice, I will become proficient in various technical skills of the digital humanities.