At the start of this course, I don’t think I really knew what I had signed up for. I was not familiar with the term “digital humanities” but it sounded like a course that would help me develop more technology skills and have some room for creativity – both things I enjoy! As we delved deeper into the course, it dawned on me that all this stuff we were doing was very intuitive to me. Had I done this before? I did not know what topic modeling was (and sure wished I knew about Zotero before) and I did know how deeply philosophical some of these categorization quandaries would get. Yet, the subject matter all spoke to me in a way that was very familiar. I remembered in my prior graduate degree in Public Administration using digital tools that I gently manipulated to create a concept project explaining how non-profit organizations function versus for-profit entities in a digital version of “Monopoly” to call attention to the differences. I also remember taking a course in grad school focused on “Digital Media For Change” that taught me ways to search for up and coming tech tools and how to evaluate their potential for solution-building in the world of activism and public policy deployment. But, throughout these learning experiences, I don’t ever remember the phrase “digital humanities.” Now that I have been introduced to the skill set of a digital humanist though, I finally realize that I had been engaged in the practice of digital humanities throughout much of my prior academic and professional work already; I just did not know it was a specific discipline in and of itself. I have been part of this tribe all along; I just have a vocabulary and set of category-creating questions to better understand what it is in comparison to other modalities of thinking and doing things. This is all to say, perhaps the most important thing I learned in this course was not a specific tool, but a way of thinking about and articulating solutions that may not be in everyone’s vocabulary.

This is a class where you should think of yourself as a pioneer making something new from the common tools we all have but might choose to apply differently. There will not be one right way to do things, and there will certainly be many things that go wrong (I think the pandemic counts here, and how it put a damper on our virtual reality class prospects), and that’s just how it should be. Do not compare yourself to others and what they produce, but collaborate and share ideas. Think less about what you don’t know (don’t let anxiety hijack your brain) and focus on what you want to do and then consider what tech tools might get you there and play with them. This is a place for curiosity, collaboration, and creativity. Embrace failure, because it might bring you to an unexpected success.

There are some tools from this class I’ll take. I’ll never cite without Zotero again – I needed that last semester alone! I can easily see how to incorporate StoryMaps into my work as a diplomat in sharing unique stories from around the world and Scalar, as much as a pain as it is to load content into at times, is a pretty slick story platform for the visually minded. But, more than anything, I’ll bring with me a confidence in advocating for why and how to use technology in my professional environment (which some have considered a less than quaint fossil – Secretary of State Colin Powell is most often credited with updating State Department technology infrastructure in the early 2000’s) because I’m so much more educated on digital humanities as an academic discipline now. That level of scholarship brings valuable credence when advocating to the U.S. government on why it is okay to tinker with tools still in development. I understand there is a cultural disconnect between being an official institution that needs to project its capabilities with certainty and the more “dynamic” processes of digital humanities. But, I also think that part of the U.S. government’s ability to show its strength comes in displaying appropriate amounts of authenticity at the very human level. Or, as the respected journalist Edward R. Murrow put it: “To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible, we must be truthful.” And, the truth is, we need to engage people where they are, which isn’t necessarily in person anymore; it is through technology platforms.

Murrow also famously said: “The real crucial link in the international exchange is the last three feet, which is bridged by personal contact, one person talking to another.” With all due respect to Murrow, sometimes, bridging the “last three feet” in person is desirable, but not necessarily feasible at the scale with which the State Department must operate now and in the future. But, with a little digital humanities savvy, we can still build a very human-centered community, no matter the technology interface that gets us there.