Hello, fellow HASTAC Scholars! I’m looking forward to getting to meet each of you and to embark on this year-long journey together. My name is Emily VanBuren, and I am a first year doctoral student in Modern European History here at Northwestern, specializing in Modern Britain. My fields of interest include Cultural History, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. My current research focuses on interwar British theatre as a space of reflection on the First World War, and I’m beginning to move my project toward the context of internationalism and the stage. This is probably enough information to demonstrate that I am training as an interdisciplinary historian, and my arrival in the HASTAC seminar is the direct result of my desire to work across fields.

In the book Debates in the Digital Humanities (edited by Gold), I especially enjoyed the interview with Brett Bobley, published in Part I. He predicts that the digital humanities will have its greatest impact in terms of scale – “Big, massive, scale” (63). I see it the same way, and I hope the increase in size will generate greater interdisciplinarity and collaboration as research projects and exponentially increasing sources demand the expertise of more than one or two researchers. I’m interested in how long it will take for interdisciplinary humanities research to move from something novel to the norm (or if it already has!). Like several of those who sought to define the digital humanities in the book, I see it as the application of digital tools to “traditional” humanities research, making the work not only more efficient but also opening up new questions to be asked of our materials and sources.

From a practical standpoint, I’m also drawn to this field because of the “big, massive, scale” that Bobley mentions, and the challenges it has already caused me. I’m lucky be working with a very exciting archive in my research. But it’s also proved daunting tackling a mountain of primary sources during my first large-scale project. I’ve turned to digital tools in an effort to better organize and analyze these materials, but I’m excited to discover more effective methods than those I’m currently employing. I’m hoping my year as a HASTAC Scholar will help me in that pursuit.

There are about a dozen other issues related to the digital humanities that I’m looking forward to discussing with the other participants (like access to tools in the face of massive cuts to educational funding, or how this field will change the career paths of myself and my cohort), but I’ll save those for now. I’m looking forward to getting to know all of you. Feel free to contact me on Twitter (@emilydvb). See you soon.