When I was first told that I was to make a website that would display my thoughts and works relating to the literature we read for our digital humanities class, I think the most important questions that arose were, firstly, how to represent myself online using the resources that were available to me through this assignment, and secondly, what it would mean for me to have an online presence. It is one thing to comment anonymously on a given website, but it is an entirely different situation, with more at stake, when my name is attached to whatever I say. I’ll start my reflection on my experience with building my website by discussing the foundation on which the site stands: WordPress.
While I did learn a fair amount about some of the basic functions of WordPress, I really felt myself noticing my technological limitations in trying to make my website my own. These limitations simply stemmed from not directly creating the technology that I was using and from my lack of an advanced technological vocabulary. For instance, I found it nearly impossible to settle on a pre-made theme for my website, chosen from the selection of themes offered by WordPress, as I did not feel a real connection with any of those that I encountered. I do recognize that there are thousands to choose from, and perhaps I just did not have the time to sift through enough of them to land on one that I could deem satisfactory, but I was not entirely satisfied with the theme that I ended up choosing. I would imagine that if I had known how to design a theme, I might have been able to better reflect my idea of the virtual space that I would like to inhabit.
Regarding technological vocabulary, I became aware of how foreign some programming language is when I was searching plugins to add to my site. While I did have some things in mind that I wanted my website to be able to do, it was difficult to be able to locate plugins that could perform what I wanted. Many of the descriptions for the plugins included language that I was unfamiliar with, which made me shy away from them despite their favorable reviews.
On the more positive side, managing my own blog has allowed me to voice my opinions on the literature that I read in a social way that I had not really been able to experience before creating the site. It is one thing to encounter spur-of-the-moment questions that arise in traditional English classes and give unprepared insight on previously read material, but it is an entirely different process for me to sort out my reactionary thoughts on literature ahead of time and think about how they will be read on a page when someone else comes across them to critique, absorb, and experience them. Knowing that there is an audience for my thoughts, that previously went unfiltered and unrecognized, is something that has driven me to formulate questions and insights that provoke constructive criticisms and discussions that help me better understand literary pieces from different points of view. Others reacting to my words make it seem like they are of some consequence, when they otherwise would remain immobile in my head. Managing my site has also given me some valuable experience that helps me better understand exploration under the canopy of digital humanities.
By writing consistent blog posts, I have accidentally led myself to dissect literature using the Internet in ways that I had not before, which, it seems to me, is part of what digital humanities is all about. One example comes to mind, which is when I posted about Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “In Mrs Tilscher’s Class”. A part of this poem alludes to Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, two people who I had somehow not learned about before encountering this poem. Upon arriving at their names in the poem’s lines, I immediately looked them up on Wikipedia, learning about how they were responsible for the Moors murders and the stain that these murders left on England. Reading about the details of these murders left me in a dark cloud of solemn thought, which helped me better understand the gravity of the lines in which they appear in the poem. I continued to read, and before I knew it I had read up on much of England’s recent history, education, and culture, which allowed me to gain a much better understanding of what Duffy might have experienced at the time of her writing this poem. After this whole process, I blogged about part of what I had learned to share with my peers, which then gave them access to my experience. This kind of exploration through wandering, refining my thoughts, and sharing them, to me, makes me feel like I am an active member of the digital humanities circle.
All in all, this assignment really launched me into an arena of social experimentation and academic discussion that I have come to greatly appreciate. The only thing that I would change about this assignment is that I would make learning to digitally create with a little bit more advanced techniques part of the process of building the website. When my website does not look a certain way or I want it to perform a certain function, it is sometimes frustrating to be stuck in a sort of uninformed paralysis that leads me no other option but to settle for the creations of others that I have access to. Obviously digital humanities is a different discipline than pure coding or programming, but it would be nice to even just get a small glimpse into what goes into creating the content that we use to try to make a page our own.