“The field of Digital Humanities may see the emergence of polymaths who can ‘do it all’: who can research, write, shoot, edit, code, model, design, network, and dialogue with users. But there is also ample room for specialization and, particularly, for collaboration.”
Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 15.
I think this quote goes a long way to describing the situation we are currently experiencing at Carleton. There’s certainly a fair handful of polymaths, and extremely high-achieving ones at that, who take to everything they do like a duck to water and apply their prodigious intellect equally well to coding in C++ as they do to citing in the Chicago manual of style. However, the vast majority of people do not excel in every field they undertake. We as Carleton students are asked to try plenty of different disciplines in the name of the liberal arts, but there are innumerable institutional aids in place to make sure we don’t fall flat on our faces in doing so.
What results is a cohort of students who all possess a deep control of serval specialized skills and a vague understanding of what it is their peers might be really good at due to general knowledge of subjects outside their own. This is particularly conducive to the collaboration that Burdick and her colleagues emphasize in this quote.
It reminds me of my own cross-disciplinary collaborations during my time at Carleton, including the joint development of a choose your own adventure style e-book by myself and two CS students in a history course I took my freshman year. We all brought our specialized skills and modes of thought to the project, and what resulted was a product we could all be proud of.
Looking forward to this course, and more broadly to the rest of my time at Carleton, I’m interested in developing a deeper understanding of digital modes of researching and presenting historical analysis. I tried my hand a writing a quantitively-based history paper last term, and it made me excited to find more tools than a single excel sheet with which to scrutinize and illustrate the past.
