The official story of how I ended up here is this (stolen from my usual venue at MITH): Jennifer Guiliano received a Bachelors of Arts in English and History from Miami University (2000), a Masters of Arts in History from Miami University (2002), and a Masters of Arts (2004) in American History from the University of Illinois before completing her Ph.D. in History at the University of Illinois (2010). She has served as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant and Program Manager at the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (2008-2010) and as Associate Director of the Center for Digital Humanities (2010-2011) and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of South Carolina. Her post-doctoral work contributes to the growing discipline of digital humanities through her explorations of how computing transforms both the questions humanists can ask as well as the answers that can be generated with digital tools, methods, and pedagogies. Her day to day responsibilities at MITH focus on project development including grant writing, project management, staff supervision, and aiding the MITH team in their digital humanities endeavors. Lots of words that really just point to a bunch of degrees and a host of former jobs….all of which boils down to the fact that I’m a historian who works at a digital humanities center.
so why am I blogging here: When I was 10 years old, I was bored to death one summer and my mother challenged me to read every book in our public library about Abraham Lincoln. If I read everything by the end of summer, she’d take me and my younger brother to visit Lincoln sites in Illinois. Probably doesn’t sound like a cool summer to most but for a kid stuck in Ohio in the middle of summer who was fascinated with history and particularly the history of the 19th century, the idea of getting to go visit the places I read about in books was awesome. So fast forward 10 plus weeks ( all 6 volumes of the Carl Sandburg biography of Lincoln and over 3000 pages), and I was loaded into the car with my mom and my brother to go spend a long weekend visiting the places I’d been reading about. Between my love of reading and my love of talking, I decided that summer that I wanted a career where I could tell stories that mattered. Stories of the past that could help us remember and stories that could transform our understanding of the future. Since unpaid know it all was taken, I decided being an academic would have to be second best.
So where does the digital play into this? I was a lucky kid in the 1980s. My mom loved technology so we were the first family in our group to have an Apple computer, an Atari, and a whole host of other 1980s tech. I was the only seven year old obsessed with answering every question on Jeopardy (1986, Apple IIe), and playing every possible permutation of the Oregon Trail (which we’ll play in class). When my brothers were fighting over the atari, I was memorizing every play sequence possible. All of this translated into a summer in a program run by my local college for kids interested in technology—we toured state of the art (for 1989/1990) facilities for robotics and computing and even got to build our own robot. Geeky I know but it was seriously fun at the time and kicked off a decades long fascination with technology that has only grown. And when the graphical browser moved us from green screens and terminals to visual interfaces, it was like an entirely new world for me. I lived through CompuNet, Compuserve, AOL, dial-up….each something built on an older technology that we now call obsolete. I learned to build CPU’s from scratch in the basement of a friends’ house and how to solder circuit boards into place on laptops. Hardware, software, didn’t matter. I love the notion that technology constantly evolves and challenges not just how we communicate but what we know and how we know it.
I trained in one of the most conservative disciplines…history. Three different times when I was in graduate school I was told by a faculty member that the type of research I wanted to do wasn’t “historical” enough. It was too contemporary, too cultural, or too interdisciplinary. So, I became a digital humanist. Where I could tell the types of stories I wanted to tell, with technologies that would not just let me tell the stories but became essential modes of how I got to the answers. So, when DCC proposed I teach a course, I thought about all the things I would want to know when it comes to digital culture and creativity and then I turned to the people I work with…who are experts in their particular fields…and we brainstormed. What united our work as a historian, two literature scholars, and a physicist/computer scientist? What types of things would we want to learn in a class on digital culture and creativity? And how could we make this course interesting? If we were going to spend 16 weeks together, where would we want to end up?
So, each of you ended up here because you chose to take the class….I’m here because I want to see what stories each of you want to tell. They can be personal, public, private, political, apolitical, historical, ahistorical, I don’t care. I just want, by the end, for each of you to understand what is narration, how it plays into the modern digital world, and how storytelling forms an integral part of everyday experiences. Along the way, I want each of you to think about how digital spaces and platforms enable and limit you in telling stories. And if I get to sneak in all the cool stuff I love (like oregon trail), all the better.
Now for the avatar portion: the avatar is my standard professional avatar representing how I work best…on my couch, in my pajamas, at home.