Nazua Idris 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 Nazua's experience at the summer school here:
Attending the “Digital Scholarship in the Library” strand of DHOXSS 2024 was a unique and enriching experience. Even though my doctoral degree is in literary studies, I am pursuing a non-traditional dissertation project that involves building a digital archive in addition to writing a thesis. In the Fall of 2023 and Summer of 2024, I visited the UK to conduct archival research in various libraries and archives, including the British Library, the National Archives UK, and Bodleian Libraries, to collect nineteenth-century texts written by formerly enslaved and colonized populations from India and the West Indies. The objective of my doctoral project is not only to recover these texts but also to design curriculum and teaching materials based on them to make classroom teaching more oriented toward inclusivity, equity, and racial justice. To that end, I am building a digital archive as part of my doctoral project to digitize the texts I collected from the archives and the lesson plans I have been designing and make them accessible to students and teachers in schools and universities across the globe.
Introduction to the digital methods, technology, tools, and platforms to build and support the digital scholarship in the library has provided me with an in-depth understanding of the stages of creating a sustainable and worldwide accessible digital archive. I have always wondered how, as an individual scholar, I can ensure the accessibility, sustainability, and longevity of my project. Particularly, I had to access several Digital Humanities projects using the Wayback machine because those projects are no longer searchable and accessible since the domains and technology used to build them have become outdated. Thus, getting a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes work that the team members of the renowned research libraries in the UK are doing has been an eye-opener. It helped me see that building a sustainable archive requires rigorous intellectual, technical, and editorial work and can only be achieved through cross-disciplinary collaboration between the researchers and team members of the libraries. Attending the workshops of this strand helped me rethink the scope of my dissertation project as it deepened my understanding of how much is achievable through individual endeavor. Listening to all the amazing speakers and seeing the work they have been doing have helped me figure out a clear path for my future research. After finishing my doctoral degree, I plan to apply for research grants and fellowships that not only provide funding but also provide opportunities to collaborate with research libraries that have the infrastructure and resources to support digital scholarship.
I really liked how the “Digital Scholarship in the Library” strand has been organized––all the sessions provided a combination of theories, methods, and practices in this field. Each session started with an introduction to a particular digital tool and/or method, moving on to a detailed discussion with specific examples. During the final section of each session, the participants were invited to try some of the open-access tools or play around with the examples and resources provided by the facilitator, share observations, and ask questions. The content of the sessions was very well planned and provided the beginners with a comprehensive overview of the digital tools and methods that the research libraries are using, including Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), artificial intelligence, and tools for text and data mining, data cleaning, and automated text recognition. I particularly enjoyed the sessions on the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) as it was a whole new experience for me.
I am very grateful to the team members of the DHOXSS and the Research Libraries UK for offering this outstanding strand and making it possible for me to attend by awarding me with the bursary.
