I’m settling in at APS and enjoying the work and workplace atmosphere. My second week was much like the first, involving lots of digitization and image treatment of the aforementioned Franklin Post Office Book, but this time with the addition of Technical Difficulties- an unavoidable but still odious aspect of doing digital work.

I’d hoped to have the digitization phase of the project finished this week, but my progress was slowed by issues with hard drive storage space, diminishing image resolution quality, and fickle image treatment software. I found myself scanning portions of the book over and over again while troubleshooting and desperately pleading with the computer to function for at least an hour before requiring a reboot. I’m pretty sure it looked something like this:

In a panel at the James A. Barnes Graduate Student Conference this spring entitled “The Importance of Being Digital: How Can Graduate Students Help Build Digital Bridges?,” I advocated for digital humanities work in the undergraduate classroom as a way to acclimating students to ‘failing’ as part of the learning process. It’s extraordinarily rare to succeed on the first try of anything, but digital projects tend to highlight this facet in a sometimes obnoxiously prominent way. This week’s experience was a good reminder for me to be patient, take a deep breath, and try again when things just don’t work the way they “should.” I’m learning! It’s a process! What else can I do!

The other thing I’ve been working toward this week is the bibliographic essay that will be due for the in-class portion of this summer practicum. I’m really rather at a loss as to what topic I want to focus the assignment on. If this will eventually serve as a lit review or be incorporated into my thesis, I think I’ll need to focus on some aspect of digital humanities methodology. My supervisor at APS, Scott Ziegler, has been a lot of help in finding articles and talking this through, and I keep thinking back to the hack vs. yack debate after our discussions. I’m not completely sold on using it as a topic, because I’m not 100% on board with the ideas implicit in the debate to begin with. Do I really want it to figure into my thesis?

In other news, I was inordinately excited when a friend mentioned that she saw I’m listed on the APS website as one of the Digital Humanities Fellows. Huzzah!

I’m heading to Chicago for the Victorian Society in American Summer School, so I won’t be logging any new fellowship updates for a couple of weeks until I get back. I will likely have some reflections on the Summer School here.

I leave you with a lovely view of the Thomas Jefferson Garden at the APS Library, with the APS Museum in the background. I feel so lucky to spend the summer here.

Hours for this week: 14
Total hours: 27