My name is Lisa Danca and I am a senior at Salem State University. This semester I will be serving as a research assistant on Dr. Scott Nowka's digital humanities project. The page you are now on is the corner of the Internet where I will be logging my experience.
Nowka's project is on Charles Gildon and textual editing. As soon as I got word I'd be working with him from my internship coordinator, Dr. Roopika Risam, I knew it would be a perfect fit for me based on my concentration, professional writing.
On the first day of classes, January 19th, I read two readings Nowka assigned me- the first chapter from Debates In The Digital Humanities and a bibliography entry regarding Gildon. The chapter was a brief overview of the digital humanities and reasons as to why English departments are heavily involved in them. The most fascinating things I learned from it was that in the 2009 MLA Convention digital humanities was named the next big thing in academia and that social media has been used to heavily promote and popularize it. This semester I am taking Social Media and Collaborative, where an emphasis will be put on workplace usage.
On January 26, I had my first formal meeting with Nowka. It was here I learned what I will be doing for him over the next fifteen weeks. I will be responsible for taking a rare collection of Gildon's work and editing it so it is legible and accessible to online users all over the globe. When this project is completed, users can obtain it from 18th Connect, an online database for 18th century scholarship. Because I will need to know basic coding to edit, Nowka had me create an account on Code Academy, an online course that teaches user how to code.
I feel privileged to have the chance to work with Nowka not only because he is one the nicest and most intelligent faculty members at Salem State, but he had the same internship as me when he was undergraduate. Only back then, he was working on the premiere electronic literary journal!
Kirschendbaum, Matthew. “What Is Digital Humanities and What's Doing It Doing In English
Departments?" Debates In Digital Humanities. Ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 3-10. Print.
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