Daniel Brew 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 Daniels's experience at the summer school here:
I’m a PhD candidate at the Open University studying music within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. I enrolled on the Humanities Data course at the DHOxSS 2024, attending in-person at St. Anne’s College. Initially, I was keen to attend having developed an interest in data visualisation over the course of my current PhD research as well as being keen to develop a deeper understanding of specific software such as OpenRefine to aid me in the analysis of a large data set I’m currently working with. Outside of this and an interest in the work of one particular speaker, I didn't really know what to expect – having never attended a summer school such as this and feeling like a rather novice researcher as far as my understanding of broader subjects in the humanities was concerned.
To this end, the summer school proved to be a valuable opportunity to broaden my understanding of the current concerns and innovations within other fields of humanities research, enabling me to reflect upon how these might be relevant to my field and/or how my discipline could potentially contribute to broader discourse. Take, for example, the need to develop more robust methods for preserving digital artefacts and their contextual information (provenance) in a world of software and technology which is constantly evolving. Similar concerns can be observed in music for works which implement the use of specific software and/or hardware which can, similarly, quite quickly become obsolete. Through attendance at the DHOxSS, I feel encouraged and better informed to consider the potential of creatively pursuing solutions to such problems across disciplines. I also see the need to do so.
Another key aspect of the summer school was the opportunity for students to present their work and demonstrate how they use digital humanities-related software in their research. It’s here where another student introduced me to ATLAS.ti which is proving to be a very powerful tool as I use it to code and analyse a number of interview transcripts.
Finally, the course provided opportunities to connect and socialise with other like-minded researchers from a wide range of humanities disciplines. This led to some really engaging conversations and set against the backdrop of Oxford’s centuries-old architecture and bustling academic life, this made for a refreshing change from the day-to-day life of writing up my PhD!
Overall, my time in Oxford was incredibly inspiring. The staff and speakers were all incredibly helpful and I was able to ask questions pertaining to my own work and received really insightful and engaged guidance from more experienced researchers. As someone considering a future career in academia, I greatly benefited from the holistic overview of current humanities research that the DHOxSS provided. As a result, I feel better equipped to move forward with my own research and, in doing so, to consider the potential for my study to be more broadly relevant to humanities research.
