Jeanette Croen was awarded a bursary to attend the Introduction to Digital Humanities strand of the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School in 2025. To join the mailing list and learn about the next summer school sign up here. Read about Jeanette's experience at the summer school here:
In August, I had the privilege to attend one of the online strands at the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School 2025, Introduction of Digital Humanities. I am a PhD researcher in History at the University of Lincoln studying the history of museum collection databases and their useability. Attending this strand allowed me to develop a stronger grasp of digital humanities and methodologies and understand which would be suitable to analyse my own research and data. I now have a much clearer idea of which digital humanities methods would work the best for my specific project.
We began with the fascinating history of digital scholarship at Oxford and how this course was developed. I was intrigued to hear that it started with text encoding initiatives as this is something I’ve heard less about compared to seemingly more popular methods like 3D modeling or Large Language Models. We also discussed how digital collections are, in some ways, the basis of research infrastructure. This rang very true to me as all the PhD students I know within the School of Heritage and Humanities at Lincoln have utilized digital collections in some way for their research. As I got my start in museum digitizing collections, it was helpful to be validated in my passion and reinforced desire to continue my research in making museum collections digitally accessible to all.
This led into a conversation about the “streetlight effect”, which illustrates that people only search where they can see - a phenomenon I was aware of but hadn’t previously heard put to words. There are so many objects and records that exist which are not easily or publicly accessible, so researchers are unaware of their existence and thus do not research the topic. By expanding the streetlight (in this case accessible records), we expand research possibilities overall and hopefully help eliminate bias and expand the histories studied and included within the mainstream narrative.
We proceeded to delve into the definition of digital. This has always intrigued me as the definition seems to ebb and flow depending on the field and with whom you are discussing the matter. We considered questions like: if something is mentioned in a digital text does that then make it digital? If it has a full catalogue entry but the object itself is not digitized, is it digital? This naturally led into a discussion about how the public widely assumes that online digital collections are complete, which is often not the case. If fact, most collections of any sort aren’t ‘complete’ as there are always biases and missing pieces. This nicely ties into my thesis which explores the accessibility of digital collections by first identifying and then examining the many assumptions about them.
The online format of the course meant that I had peers from all over the world. This led to interesting conversations and questions as everyone came from varied professions and had different levels of knowledge on the subjects and methods discussed. I would highly recommend this course to anyone looking for an overview of digital humanities, especially if you could not afford to travel or take a full week out to attend a course. I hope to get the chance to join another course next year.
