Throughout this week, we’ve been working in the digital humanities for the first time, at least for me. During this experience, I’ve been thinking back to the first week of class when we were trying to define what the digital humanities really is. I was brought back to one definition I got on the website that basically stated that DH wasn’t a real area of study. If I’m being honest, I was beginning to think along this track of mind during the beginning of week when we first started working in Omeka. We were really just documenting artifacts through photos and descriptions, which one could say is simply just a means of research for say the humanities in this case as well look at a West Chester student from years past. However as the week went on, especially after Wednesday’s class, I began to return to the idea that the digital humanities really is it’s own area of study. The work that goes into documenting these artifacts isn’t as simple as one might think. There is a certain method that comes to documenting artifacts in terms of how we describe them, date them, photograph them, etc. Learning the process that goes into documenting artifacts like we are doing is an area of study in its own right as there is so much to learn in order to be beneficial to education and research. It’s not just the process that makes it an area of study either, but also how this process itself will be a learning source and even an artifact itself in the future. People in the digital humanities will look back at this field in some years to see how the field as changed in terms of documenting artifacts and that will become a research topic of its own.
