Amy Wells was awarded a bursary to attend the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School in 2024. To join the mailing list and learn about the next summer school sign up here. Read about Amy's experience at the summer school here:
As a researcher of libraries and collections in National Trust country houses, with a background in Library and Information Science alongside academic Literature studies, the Digital Scholarship in the Library summer school offered me a great opportunity to learn more about potential applications I can use in my work, and to get to know other elements of the ever-expanding ecological web of the Digital Humanities. Perhaps my biggest takeaway from the course was the idea of DH as an ecology; diverse roles, processes, applications and systems which are connected to support the intellectual work of academics, leading to greater efficiency and new understandings of research findings. Thinking about DH in this way led me to a more positive attitude about the possibilities afforded by technology than I have held previously. Oftentimes such applications, particularly in the age of Artificial Intelligence, are posed in opposition to the more “human” or organic work of traditional Humanities scholarship, as a threat to the work of an academic. The Digital Scholarship in the Library summer school made me see that DH is not only made possible by a continuation of the traditional intellectual work, but that the two complement each other rather than compete.
This was achieved by the diversity of voices we heard from during the course, and the range of topics covered in the sessions. It was also very interesting to hear the different career paths that speakers had taken to arrive at their current role, further contributing to the idea that the Digital Humanities do not have one mode of existence but are rather tools that can be used in a variety of ways. One particular strength of the Digital Scholarship in the Library course was the open-endedness of the teaching: examples of potential applications and software were shown and explained, but in a non-prescriptive manner exemplifying the idea not only that there are different ways to use DH tools, but that it is an evolving field with much still to be developed and explored. Accessibility in learning how to use DH approaches and applications was at the forefront, and I finished the course feeling encouraged to maintain a playful, curious attitude to my research. I am extremely grateful to have received a bursary to attend this summer school, and excited to see both how I implement what I learnt in my future work and how the Digital Humanities continue to expand, develop and grow.
