Hello! I am Amanda, a first-year grad student in the history department and new HASTAC scholar. I am interested in the U.S. South in the Civil War and post-emancipation. I have been involved in some way with the digital humanities since my freshman year of undergrad at the University of Richmond, where I interned with the Digital Scholarship Lab there, which largely focuses on digital history research. In my own undergraduate honors thesis, I used Network Workbench, social network analysis software, to model the social relationships between African American Virginians after the American Civil War. This digital method allowed me to better organize my sources and to understand black loyalties in Virginia during the Civil War and the concept of Unionism. As I begin studying history at Northwestern, I am excited to stay involved with digital scholarship research while also exploring the impact and implications of this research outside of history and in an interdisciplinary setting.

In my own research, I, like Emily, turned to the digital humanities as a way to organize and eventually visualize my historical sources. I am also particularly interested in the digital humanities as a teaching tool and for its potential to share and reuse information, much as Spiro articulates in Debates in the Digital Humanities, both in general and particularly as a way to connect academic and public history. With that said, here is my attempt to define digital humanities: The digital humanities is an interdisciplinary field in which scholars have integrated new media with humanities research in order to reach wider audiences and synthesize information more effectively.

I look forward to continuing these discussions in our meeting tomorrow.