Class Notes: Meeting 9
Notes from the "Translating Seminars" Panel
- How to incorporate critical practice from seminars into a laboratory or applied setting?
- There is a "tricky middle ground" to negotiate, and it involves balancing theory with hands-on experimentation.
- When conducting applied work, it's important to remember learning curves where technologies are concerned. That said, students and faculty often need to seek out training (e.g., at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute).
- Maintaining a research log (e.g., in a private GitHub repository) allows you to be "rooted in something" and also take the "blinders" off (because you take a minute to document or write about what you're doing, presumably with a future audience in mind).
- One challenge in for interdisciplinary work: How to speak to different audiences? For instance, to digital humanities, media studies, and modernist studies?
- Another challenge when moving from the graduate seminar to, say, a laboratory setting: How to scale up your seminar research? How does project design change when you move into applied environments? And how can you build research that other people can use, replicate, or even repurpose?
- Yet another challenge: Where research workflows are concerned, how can we be flexible when/where necessary? How to balance replicability + automation with attention to detail and difference?
- Importantly, the very idea of a workflow is something that translates from seminars like 507 to other contexts. There's a need to lay things out, communicate them clearly, and translate them from English studies into hands-on work.
- One perk of conducting applied research in spaces like labs and centres: "Getting your research out there." Often, seminar research is a one-to-one exchange.
- The study of language can extend into "material work." For instance, how are physical objects and technologies also about language? How are objects also everyday plot devices? Or what is the relationship between programming/code and literary/language studies?
- One benefit of working across the technical and theoretical: Balancing two (often) completely different ways of thinking in order to make more persuasive arguments.
- One challenge when conducting more technical or applied work: How to integrate material histories and historical concepts into your work? How to stress the importance of the humanities?
Emerging Issues on this Topic