Interdisciplinarity and Collaboration

Yesterday was the final meeting of the seminar which encouraged us to create this blog. During the three hours of our meeting, each of the four groups presented their respective projects and we had small amounts of time to ask questions and comment on their work. I was sincerely blown away by a) the amount of work everyone (this group included) had done, and b) the fascinating range of interests and directions the projects demonstrated. It seems necessary to say a few more words about this seminar, especially for those of you who are either not part of the seminar (hopefully more of you will be in this boat as our readership widens) or who have not clicked on the links to Alan’s beautiful home site for the seminar. Unbeknownst to me (before March of 2012), the digital humanities community on UCSB’s campus is a thriving and productive group of fascinating professors and students. Our professor, Alan, is definitely in the foreground of this group, and his carefully designed seminar engages with a good deal of important DH theory, and centers on a collaborative student project that uses digital tools to engage with some type of text, be it a novel, poem, video game, television show, or film. Our project is mostly available on this blog site, but the seminar site which is linked to above also provides a bit more information about us, our reading lists, and our academic interests. This seminar has allowed me to grow and mutate in directions I had never envisioned as a scholar. Deformance, textual analysis, and visualizations were foreign to me (okay, I was actually familiar with McGann and Samuels, but everything else is true) as scholarly and pedagogical tools. I emerge from this seminar with a reawakened energy for scholarship and a long list of blogs and books to read, people to watch, and projects to undertake. I am deeply indebted to Alan for creating this incredible course, and to my fellow graduate students for their fascinating projects and their enthusiasm in general. I would sincerely encourage you all to examine the course page, especially the project pages from the other groups. Amanda, Tom, Mary Jane, Hannah, and Alston have done incredible work that demonstrates the flexibility of the course and the extremely exciting diversity of minds within the various departments represented in our seminar. I am thrilled to have met them and learned about their work.

This is writing itself like a farewell, but in fact I have two other posts in the works that return to essays I read earlier this year, and other posts will follow as my brain spins. Keep reading, because all three of us want to keep sharing our thoughts! And pictures. Below is a link to my final reflections on our course and project, it’s a longer read (eight pages, not too bad) but might be interesting for those of you who are curious about the parameters of the seminar.

 

Reflection Paper