My time at CDRH is coming to a close – Monday is the start of my last week here. I’ve learned so much! Where do I even begin?
As far as how I’ll be spending my last week here – formatting all my documentation! I have some plans for what I think would be the most helpful for the next student who comes along to work on this project including: a diagram of how the javascript and php files talk to each other; an annotated list of web resources that were invaluable to me; Future Recommendations; a database design document that lists and describes the purpose of each table, the fields therein, and the relationship between tables; and a review of software tools that I used while working on my project. Documentation always made sense but during the course of spring semester’s Projects in Permanent Retention of Electronic Records, I learned the true importance of documentation. And not just documentation, but documentation as you go. When my group was first assigned our project and told where to look for existing documentation we were both excited and a little scared. The archival imaging machine we were tasked with getting up to spec was a little too decontextualized for our taste. We knew what it was for, sort of. We knew some of the individuals that had worked with it. But we figured that if we could talk to everyone that had shared its past, find out what had worked and what hadn’t and the rationale behind certain design and software choices, we and anyone who came after us would be able to make considerable more progress than if they had to make the same mistakes all over again.
By the end of the semester, we had performed and transcribed a series of oral history interviews, exhausted a wiki, added to the archival imaging procedures and turned them into an illustrated manual, created a visual topology of the machine, and compiled an abbreviated/narrative version of the wiki into a project report. (Granted, I got lucky – my group was amazing!) And even after all that, we all still felt that there was so much more to write down, so much more material to cover, so much more to do! The wiki had been essential for providing a space for us to jot down whatever tests we had run, whatever research we had done – a space to propose hypothesis about what went wrong and to figure out what needed to happen next. We tried so many different things that had we not documented all this as we worked, there would have been no way to reconstruct all the things we had done that failed (arguably the most valuable information for someone taking over the project), and all the places we had looked for answers. During this summer, I’ve been keeping track of questions and discoveries each day so that when I come in to work in the morning, yesterday’s questions propel me forward in my work. And now, at the end, I can compile that into a tool for someone else to use to propel them forward. The iSchoolDH blog has also been a useful source of documentation for me. I’ve already referred pack to previous posts in the last few days to grab some info for the resources I’m currently compiling. So – documentation, good.
My time here has undoubtedly informed my understanding of what Digital Humanities is as well as forced me to think about its implications for many areas of scholarship. It has also stirred my imagination as far as the shape digital humanities might take at UT, where iSchoolers fit in to the equation, and how I might be involved in answering those questions.
I would like to say thank you to Keith Nickum, Programmer at CDRH, for all his help and patience. He is the creator of the Whitman Tracking application and has been a tremendous resource over the duration of my time here. Thank you to all the CDRH faculty and staff for making me feel at home in Lincoln.
