This is so much fun in the right setting and with the right people - so many cool ideas come out! The amount of different directions a brainstorming session could go when the floor is open to more people in various locations sounds amazing.

I am very excited about this aspect of digital humanities - I hope this makes scholarship even more accessible to more people. Seeing research in different stages, especially the early ones, might further help research and scholarly projects feel more attainable to more people in certain fields (it is really easy to have imposter's syndrome or feel overwhelmed when all you ever see is the end result of others' work). Additionally, it will be awesome to have more people able to give input at the beginning stage of a study or project.

Who is deciding what an "A" paper or a "B" paper is? Why is one person in charge of this? Every instructor has a different rubric they want students to follow and every student has different strengths. I have also met a professor who would adjust grades students got on assignments so the class average would be in a specific range (they would typically adjust the grades down, not up - this professor's reasoning being that too many As would muddle selection for scholarships. ...). My point is, one person should not get to decide whose work is worthy of being publicized. A public history site should have a sort of public council. Or at very least, a larger group of people ultimately deciding on information to be shared.

I know I have been criticizing this interview a lot, and I apologize for that, but I really do hope that the speakers consider educational inequality, too, in regards to who gets to post on the Historical Project ("educated" students) and who has the right to complain about it (the "uneducated" public).

Information policed by a single person (they mention taking certain stories down and deciding to leave others without consulting anybody else) is immediately problematic and metaphorical of the current post-academic system in general, in my opinion.

I am concerned because they are speaking as though inequality is a thing of the past - do they mean a specific timeframe of inequality?

I do find this a really interesting detail to add. This will paint a really broad picture of a place and time.

I find it interesting that this project is assumedly for the public, but the speaker is frustrated to hear from the public when papers written by students and marked by (I am assuming) a single professor contain inaccuracies.

This really makes me question how to make sure history is accurate and education is fair without falling victim to gatekeeping or violating freedom of speech. How do you monitor the content of a site like the speaker's without submitting work to peer review (with the idea of "peer review" itself being limited to the academic sphere)? I certainly don't know how to fix it, beyond making sure more than a single person is reviewing student submissions before being posted to a historical site.

That being said, maybe the work was factually accurate but saying Jackson was "brave" is definitely that one student's biased opinion and absolutely problematic, and in my opinion shouldn't have been posted.

I do not understand. Nothing in history is in stasis. Language changes all the time. Even pens are constantly being updated. What is happening here.

I can see the potential problems with technology that is changing so quickly, but I don't believe the answer is to quit when it becomes overwhelming. Maybe I am being overly simplistic, but surely the younger people the speaker referenced earlier in the interview (the ones who are particularly adept at digital technologies) could work to come up with a solution, maybe a new "Engine" that adapts with changing technologies? I feel like every site in existence needs to adapt and improve - mobile games have to constantly update, for example, and they have a lot of moving parts. The speaker's main problem seems to be an inability to fully adapt; their project, although innovative when it first came to be, is stuck in time.

While I think this is fundamentally good advice, it is also leaning on the idea that no new technologies will be available to the student once they graduate or, ever. There is nothing wrong with having a favourite tool, but I would rather be flexible and adaptable. The speaker uses the example of a 3D printer as a potential inefficient tool - I am not sure why he used this example because it seems the interview took place fairly recently, and in 2024 3D printers are home devices for a lot of people (shoutout to everyone I know who makes D&D miniatures) and have been for a few years already. I am very confused by this podcast, overall.

This is unfortunate to find out. This statement implies that your funding is not affected by how good or impressive your idea is. Your ability to secure funding is tied to who you know, and who knows you; your ability to learn, or spend time learning something, is tied to resources that not everyone can get. It is less about deserving and more about networking.

I am excited to see how Digital Humanities positively impacts the decolonization of scholarship. Ownership of stories and histories shared by a group of peoples without insisting everyone involved needs a (very expensive) degree in order to have a story worth recording would be wonderful.

Another curious stance, considering this professor teaches Digital Humanities. I do get their point -- I feel as though certain information needs a specific vehicle to make sense. For instance, I would rather hear a song than have the lyrics presented to me on a soundless PowerPoint. However, they make it seem like a huge burden or chore. I am not understand what they mean by "heartbreak." Additionally, who is deciding what "needs" to be digital or not? (Who is deciding, and why?)

I find this to be a curious stance -- digital humanities seems, to me, another way of recording and sharing information, which is, arguably, human. People have been trying to share information orally, on stone tablets, on skins, on paper, etc. since the beginning and to me, digitally is simply another way to do that. Not inferior, not superior. Just different. But still fundamentally "humanistic".

The degree to which the study of (and record-keeping for) the humanities has changed in less than a century is absolutely mind-boggling. According to Wikipedia, the first personal computer was not developed until the 1970s; maybe I am understanding the term "computer" too literally, but the fact that someone was already thinking of "humanities computing" 20-30 years before computers were home devices is so cool.

I find this stance to be a form of gatekeeping, and reductive. Quality is of course important, but I find it very frustrating that as soon as something becomes associated with "academics" or "scholarship," people immediately begin limiting who can do it and why, as if severely restricting its practice will keep it "pure" or "better."