DH Summer Scholars Impress at Bucknell Digital Humanities Conference

Posted on November 7, 2016 by Charlotte Nunes

Guest-blogger Will Gordon ’17, one of the Skillman Library 2016 Digital Humanities Summer Scholars, reports on a successful presentation at the Bucknell University Digital Scholarship Conference.

From left to right: DH Summer Scholars Will Gordon, Tawfiq Alhamedi, Caroline Nawrocki, Mila Temnyalova, and Johnny Gossick

Last Friday, I piled into a van with four of my friends and fellow digital humanities scholars to drive to Bucknell University to present our undergraduate research and learn more about digital humanities. Research and Instruction Librarian Sarah Morris, who is also the leader of the Digital Humanities Summer Scholar Program at Lafayette College, drove us to the Bucknell University Digital Scholarship Conference (#BUDSC16). Tawfiq Alhamedi ‘17, Caroline Nawrocki ‘18, Mila Temnyalova ‘18, Johnny Gossick ‘18, and I were all part of the summer program, in which we each designed, researched, and realized our projects.

Now it was time to present our projects to a crowd of undergraduates, graduate students and academics through a panel session and electronic posters. Dinner and the keynote speech from Assistant Professor of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University Tressie McMillan Cottom filled the first night. We learned about incorporating the digital humanities into a sociology graduate program, and saw ways to pursue these interests after graduating from Lafayette.

It was our turn to present the next day. Tawfiq, Caroline, Mila, and Sarah partnered up with members of Gettysburg College for a panel session on how to design a successful undergraduate digital humanities research program. Other attendees at the conference tweeted and commented on how impressed they were with Gettysburg’s and Lafayette’s programs.

DH Summer Scholar Mila Temnyalova presents

Afterward, Saturday’s keynote speaker, UCLA professor Safiya Noble, spoke about biases in search engine algorithms at lunch and their effects on the way people perceive race and gender. Her talk illustrated the power of algorithms and information bias in society, and proved the importance of doing good digital scholarship.

As the day came to an end, Tawfiq, Caroline, Johnny and I took part in an electronic poster session while academics and other attendees drank wine, ate hors d’oeuvre, and wandered the room to listen to our presentations and others.

After packing up our things and going to a panel session Sunday morning, we began the journey back to Lafayette. Although, at times, scholarship can be a strange endeavor, we were excited about the opportunity to present our undergraduate research projects, and the positive feedback we received.

DH Summer Scholars Present to a Full House

Posted on September 23, 2016 by Charlotte Nunes

Under the leadership of Sarah Morris, Research and Instruction Librarian at the Skillman Library, the 2016 Lafayette College Digital Humanities Summer Scholars undertook independent research projects on such topics as Iranian statecraft, Soviet monument culture in Bulgaria, the misunderstood Moog synthesizer, and histories of Indian Ocean trade and migration.

From left to right: Will Gordon, Johnny Gossick, Tawfiq Alhamedi, Caroline Nawrocki, and Mila Temnyalova.

On Wednesday, five Summer Scholars presented their projects to a packed audience in the Gendebien Room. In order to pursue their interdisciplinary research questions, students in the program used a variety of tools, platforms, and methods. In most cases, students combined digital approaches so as to take advantage of unique capabilities. For instance, Tawfiq Alhamedi used Omeka’s Neatline plug-in along with ArcGIS to reproduce the orientation of medieval Indian Ocean cartography in his project’s interactive map. Other projects incorporated Scalar, Cytoscape, and TimelineJS, among other tools and platforms.

Mila Temnyalova presents her digital project “Soviet Mo(nu)ments in Bulgaria.”

Tawfiq reflects, “the Digital Humanities Summer Scholarship was a unique and valuable experience for me to explore new methodologies that truly brought my research to life. Working in a creative and supportive environment helped nourish my project from being an abstract idea to becoming a useful digital resource open to anyone interested in my topic.” DH Summer Scholar Caroline Nawrocki agrees about the distinctive value of the program: “it was an incredibly unique learning experience. It was a constant process of developing knowledge on digital tools, my specific topic, and what it means to be a researcher without being concerned about a grade or with failure.”

Dr. Paul Barclay, who was in attendance at Wednesday’s event, also points out the value of the program in terms of its emphasis on experimentation in undergraduate research: “the program shows the value of letting students explore data, its visualization, and computational methods for humanities research in an independent research setting.”

Check out all of the DH Summer Scholar Projects at the project website! To learn about Lafayette’s brand new Digital Humanities Club, please contact President Tawfiq Alhamedi (alhamedt@lafayette.edu) or Vice-President John Gossick (gossickj@lafayette.edu).

DHLaf students present their work at Bucknell Digital Initiatives Conference

Posted on November 11, 2015 by Emily McGinn

Jethro Israel, Ian Morse, Ben Draves, Vincent DeMarco and Feevan Megersa at the Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference.

This weekend five Lafayette students presented their work at Bucknell University’s Digital Scholarship Conference, “Collaborating Digitally: Engaging Students in Public Scholarship.” The main focus of the conference was on building new ways to connect Digital Humanities and Digital Scholarship with the student experience and on developing new frameworks for including students as meaningful collaborators on digital projects. While many of the presenters focused on students as researchers or contributors to larger projects, our students presented work of their own design.

Feevan Megersa discusses her project on Ethiopian Folktales on a panel presentation.

Feevan Megersa ’17, Ian Morse ’17, and Jethro Israel ’16 presented their work on a panel “Models of Student Engagement in DH” alongside of the Library’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities Emily McGinn. Feevan presented her project “Got Folktales?” an interactive project that maps the themes and morals of a collection of Ethiopian folktales, and Ian presented work from his Solution Based Press Freedom Project. Both projects were developed as part of the Digital Humanities Summer Scholars program. The internship was sponsored by Skillman Library and supported with funding from the Library’s Andrew W. Mellon Grant for Digital Initiatives.

Jethro discussed his history with the McDonogh Project, a digital project that tells the story of Washington Watts McDonogh and David Kinney McDonogh, two emancipated slaves who were educated at Lafayette in the 1830s. Jethro described his trajectory as he moved from a student working on a class project, to an EXCEL scholar creating and managing the data behind the digital exhibit, to developing his own research interests in relation to the larger project.

Vincent DeMarco and Ben Draves during the poster session

Vincent DeMarco ’18 and Ben Draves ’17 were a part of their own separate panel where they presented their project Tempo of the Times, a data analysis project also developed in the Summer Scholars program that examines key features of popular music including polarity, “hotness” and danceability against economic data over time. They were also asked to present their work during the poster session during which they were able to do live demos of their interactive graphs and predictive models that anticipate future trends in music.

Ian Morse (center) answering questions at the NextGen Plenary session

Ian Morse was also given a second opportunity to present his work at the conference. He was selected as part of the NextGen Plenary session in which a panel of five early career scholars presented their work to the entire body of conference goers. Ian presented his project that used large scale text analysis to investigate press freedom violations surrounding Turkey’s Gezi Park protests. His work dovetailed perfectly with keynote speaker Micki Kaufman’s methods on text analysis on Henry Kissinger’s correspondence.

Lafayette College was well represented with one of the largest contingents of students, all of whom had produced exceptional work that set the standard for undergraduate research in the digital humanities. They showed a professionalism and dedication to their work that stands as a testament to the culture of research and intellectual curiosity at Lafayette. During the course of the conference, all of our students became valuable resources for their peers as well as to faculty and administrators hoping to replicate their same success at other institutions.

To continue to build a community of practitioners and collaborators here at Lafayette, we will be holding a general interest session Wednesday December 2 in the tech lounge (Pardee 28) from 3-5. Our students will be available to talk more about their projects and are hoping to find students interested in starting their own digital projects and collaborating with them in the future. Drop in anytime between three and five.

For more information contact Sarah Morris, Research and Instruction Librarian at morrisse@lafayette.edu.

Summer Scholars Program Introduces Students to DH

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Emily McGinn

This summer Skillman Library launched Lafayette’s first undergraduate digital humanities internship program. The Digital Humanities Summer Scholars program, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and supported by the Library’s Digital Scholarship Services, offered an internship opportunity for seven students to work on a digital research project of their own design.

The program offered students the space, the time, and the resources to become content creators in their own right. Our call for proposals tapped into the creative energy of the Lafayette student body and yielded proposals that demonstrated exactly the type of inquiry and ingenuity we were hoping for. These seven students were selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants, and represent disciplines from across Lafayette’s academic community:

Ahmed Malik Braxton – Government and Law
Vincent DeMarco – Mathematics
Benjamin Draves – Mathematics
Feevan Megersa – Liberal Arts
Ian Morse – History; Math
Peter Todaro – Government and Law
Miranda Wilcha – Environmental Studies; Anthropology

The six-week course was structured as a workshop during which the students would meet as a group under the instruction of Emily McGinn, Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at Skillman Library. In the group setting each would present updates on their work, ask for feedback, and troubleshoot any obstacles they might have encountered. Together this group functioned as a microcosm of all digital projects, tackling questions of copyright, access, and authorship in addition to confronting the difficult task of data collection and cleaning.

Most important, the workshop served as a model for project management. Our summer interns deconstructed their proposals and sharpened them into accomplishable tasks and focused hypotheses. In taking the time to define a realistic scope for the project early on, they were able to identify the tools, the resources, and the technical skill they would need to accomplish their goals. Though many digital humanities projects are large scale, long-term projects that take years to build with teams of developers and researchers, our students were able to scope and build smaller scale, yet complex, well-structured projects in a few short weeks.

Each student had their own goals in mind for their project. For some, it will serve as the basis for a senior thesis, for others a sample for a grad school application, or publication. Feevan Megersa and Ian Morse will be joined by EXCEL scholar Jethro Israel to discuss their work as student researchers and project developers at Bucknell’s Digital Humanities Conference this fall. Ian will also present his work as a part of the NextGen Plenary session highlighting student projects and Vincent DeMarco and Ben Draves will be presenting their project during the poster session at the conference.

Lafayette’s is working to provide additional opportunities for undergraduate engagement both on campus and in the wider digital humanities community. As we continue to build the DH community at Lafayette, student engagement is and will continue to be a vital part of our initiative. We strive to cultivate the intellectual curiosity and autonomy our students showed us this summer and look forward to seeing where they go next.

For more information about this program visit sites.lafayette.edu/dhss.

Our Projects

Tempo of the Times
The aim of this project is to discover connections between music and society. Artists set out to create music that entertains, but also seek to create art that represents the times in which they live. This project examines the way in which societal changes shift musical composition. – Vincent DeMarco and Benjamin Draves

Got Folktales?
This project aims to capture Ethiopian folktales and to map reoccurring themes as well as highlight the moral behind each folktale. In order to accurately represent the diverse ethnicities found within the country we have selected five stories from each of the 13 regions within the country- Feevan Megersa

Solution Based Press Freedom Project
Current press freedom indices conflate myriad problems and measures into single values. When searching for solutions to press freedom violations, believing that all countries suffer from similar afflictions is counterproductive. The crux of this project has focused on establishing a method of measuring how we can use digital humanities to see how newspapers react to external events in answering the question “How does press freedom affect the ‘quality’ of journalism?” – Ian Morse

Gentrification and Barry Farms
This project analyzes the economic and social situations of many people experiencing gentrification specifically in Washington D.C. Gentrification will not only have a detrimental impact on the citizens of Barry Farms, but will also be deleterious to the entire city of Washington DC. – Ahmed Braxton

Garden of Easton
The Garden of Easton seeks to aggregate the relevant information to connect local residents to food, whether that be a community garden, a CSA pickup location, a homeless shelter, or a meal center. We do so by providing an all-encompassing Android App, a web-based map, and a plain text list of the food providers and producers in our community so that residents have an easily accessible site to find resources they need. – Miranda Wilcha and Peter Todaro

Lafayette participates in Keystone DH Transcribathon

Posted on April 16, 2015 by Emily McGinn

As part of the Keystone Digital Humanities consortium, Skillman Library’s Digital Scholarship Services participated in a virtual transcribathon along with nine other colleges and universities from the area including Muhlenberg, Lehigh, Bucknell, and University of Pennsylvania. With a great turnout of 10 contributors over the course of the event including five undergraduates and several librarians, the team was able to transcribe 125 new records, all while building a community of DH practitioners on campus and connecting with our colleagues across the state.

Transcribathon participants working on ELC pages

Our group chose to transcribe ledger records from our Easton Library Company project. On hand for the event were Professor Chris Phillips, the primary researcher on the ELC project, Diane Shaw from Lafayette’s Special Collections, and a number of undergraduate students interested in working on digital humanities projects. The ledgers contain the loan records from the Easton Library in the early 1800s. The goal of transcribing these ledgers is to gain insight into the reading practices of 19th century readers and to learn more about Easton’s local history. (To learn more about the project read our previous post on the ELC.)

As the students would find out, transcribing the pages involved not simply transferring the handwritten records into type, but also required lessons in 19th century librarian short hand, research into complex book titles, and a bit of forensic investigation. After the first few successful entries, it was easy to get lost in the world of early Easton, finding names of residents that now appear on street signs and building, and discovering long forgotten novels. Correctly deciphering an entry started to bring out the competitive spirit in the participants and by the end of the night everyone had fun engaging in some biblio detective work.

Example of a ledger page from 1823

The event lasted three hours with similar transcription efforts happening simultaneously across all of the the participating campuses connected via Google Hangout. The Keystone DH group designed this initiative based on a transcribathon event at the Folger Shakespeare Library in December. The Folger event lasted for 12 hours with 35 participants transcribing and encoding manuscript pages for inclusion in the Early Modern Manuscripts Online project. This event, though shorter in duration, was an experiment in fostering a broader community and connecting like-minded scholars and researchers all of whom are working on long term digital humanities projects.

Sample ledger facsimile, relational data table, and network graph visualization.

The data collected at the event will be added to the ELC’s quickly expanding relational database and the Transcribathon also gave us the opportunity to test a new data entry interface that Digital Scholarship Services has created. Working closely with the students engaged on the project, DSS developers James Griffin and Thom Goodnow have built forms designed to the specific needs of the ELC and the feedback from the Transcribathon will be used to refine these tools even further. Once complete, this project will allow users to investigate and visualize this data on their own and discover new relationships between readers, lenders, and the community. For us the feedback, as well as the data recorded, are invaluable in advancing the project and we look forward to more opportunities to collaborate with the Keystone community in the future.

For more information on starting a digital project with DSS or applying for an internship opportunity contact us at digital@lafayette.edu , or call (610) 330-5796.

“Collaborating Digitally:” Alena Principato ’15, DSS’ Eric Luhrs, and Professor Chris Phillips present the Easton Library Company Project at Bucknell

Posted on November 19, 2014 by Emily McGinn

Eric Luhrs, Chris Phillips, and Alena Principato at the Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference

EXCEL student Alena Principato ’15 presented her work on the Easton Library Company Project alongside project creators Professor Chris Phillips of the English department and Eric Luhrs, Director of Skillman Library’s Digital Scholarship Services team, at the first annual Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference this week.

The conference “Collaborating Digitally: Engaging Students in Faculty Research,” was sponsored by Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. It brought together a wide range of digital scholars focused on expanding digital projects into the classroom and into the research profiles of both graduate and undergraduate students.

Together the three presented on the panel “Old Records, New Questions, New Collaborations” where Alena was able to share her story as a contributor to the ELC, a project that includes digitizing and transcribing the lending records of the Easton Library Company from 1811-1862. These ledgers contain unique insights into the reading practices of 19th century readers as well as into the local Easton community of the era. From the students’ transcriptions, the DSS team has taken this data and transformed it into a relational database. Once complete, this project will allow users to investigate and visualize this data on their own and discover new relationships between readers, lenders, and the community.

Alena has been active with the project under Professor Phillips’ guidance since her arrival at Lafayette as a freshman. Now three years later, she is an expert on transcribing the records and has trained several other EXCEL students and worked directly with DSS to streamline the transcription process.

Sample ledger facsimile, relational data table, and network graph visualization.

The panel also included the team’s colleagues Professor of Public History Kyle Roberts and undergrad Evan Thompson ’15 from Loyola University in Chicago. Their work on the Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project explores the history of Loyola’s original library collection and parallels that of the ELC. Their presentation provided an additional model for integrating faculty scholarship into the undergraduate experience.

To foster student faculty collaborations like this one and to encourage the inclusion of digital methodologies into student research, the Digital Humanities Steering Committee has opened a call for proposals that includes funding for EXCEL students like Alena and for integrating DH methods in the classroom. For more information visit the steering committee’s website at sites.lafayette.edu/dhlaf.

For more information on starting a digital project with DSS or applying for an internship opportunity contact us at digital@lafayette.edu, or call (610) 330-5796.

The Digital World of Art History

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Emily McGinn

Intern Alena Principato ’15 shares her experience at Princeton Art History conference

Alena Principato excited to attend the Digital World of Art History conference at Princeton University.

With plans to earn a Masters degree in Library and Information Science and pursue a career in academic librarianship after graduating from Lafayette, I was able to use my internship with Lafayette’s Visual Resources librarian Kelly Smith to learn more about the field.

As part of my internship I had the opportunity to attend a one-day conference at Princeton University titled “The Digital World of Art History.” The conference, organized by the Index of Christian Art and Princeton’s Visual Resources Collection and Department of Art and Archaeology, centered on the theme of “Standards and Their Application.”

Armed with enthusiasm for my first professional conference, I filed into McCormick Hall and prepared to learn about cutting edge digital art history projects along with dozens of other attendees. The agenda for the day consisted of a line-up of twelve speakers, ranging from librarians and academics to digital developers, and included professionals from various cultural institutions.

Some highlights from the presentations:

Christine Kuan, a representative of Artsy (artsy.net), kicked off the day with her presentation on Artsy, Technology, and the Power of Public Access. The mission of Artsy is to make art accessible to everyone through an online platform for discovering, learning about, and collecting art that is free to the public. The site features more than 100,000 high-resolution images of artworks.

The Art Genome Project, similar in concept to Pandora’s Music Genome Project, assigns specific values to characteristics of art and architecture—the “genes” of the artwork—and uses search algorithms to create associations between related artists and artworks. This system allows for what Kuan calls a “radial” process of searching, allowing users to discover new artists based on their preferences.

Dustin Wees and Margaret Smithglass presented for the Built Works Registry (BWR), an ongoing project “to create and develop a freely available registry and data resource for architectural works and the built environment.” The project is a collaboration between the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, ARTstor, and the Getty Research Institute. The BWR imports data about works from multiple sources and seeks to standardize the title, date, and location of each work as well as assign it a unique ID number.

Set to launch this October, the BWR plans to eventually give its data to Getty to turn it into one of their authoritative databases. Resources like the BWR are important for standardizing the cataloging of visual resources by providing a controlled vocabulary to maintain consistency in cataloging across multiple institutions. In my experience cataloging with Shared Shelf, I’ve been using controlled vocabularies to assign subject tags to digitized prints produced by the Experimental Printmaking Institute. (Read more about this in my previous blog post.)

Following the afternoon presentations was a reception inside the art museum, which provided a beautiful atmosphere for networking mixed with art appreciation. Overall, the conference was a great learning experience that expanded my understanding of the possibilities for digital projects involving visual resources collections and fueled my excitement about the direction in which the field is heading.

DSS is actively seeking students from across campus and across disciplines to participate in our internship program. With us you’ll learn hands-on skills in digital scholarship, computer programming, application design, and data preservation. You’ll earn work experience while learning from a professional team on the cutting edge of digital research. E-mail us with your name, major, area of expertise, and reason for applying at digital@lafayette.edu.

The Art of Cataloging

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Emily McGinn

Alena Principato ’15 discusses her Visual Resources Internship with DSS cataloging images from the Experimental Printmaking Institute

This summer I completed an internship under the guidance of Kelly Smith, Lafayette College’s Visual Resources Librarian. I have been learning about visual resources management and assisting Kelly with the digitization of the Experimental Printmaking Institute’s body of work. Each print that is digitized must be photographed, edited, and uploaded to Shared Shelf, a cloud-based cataloging and content management system developed by ARTstor.

What is cataloging and how does it work?
According to Cataloging Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images, “to catalog a work is to describe what it is, who made it, where it was made, how it was made, the materials of which it was made, and what it is about.” This information is also referred to as metadata (essentially, “data about data”), especially when it is entered in a digital format.

Recording such data may seem straightforward, and often is; the name of the artist, the measurements of a work, and the date of creation are simple enough to ascertain. However, selecting the subject of the work is more ambiguous. As Shared Shelf explains, the subject field contains “terms that identify, describe, and/or interpret what is depicted in and by a work.”

Consider what it means to “interpret”—when a person views an art object, they draw conclusions about what it means, often through the lens of their unique background and personal experiences. A detail in a painting that captivates one person may be completely overlooked by another.

The challenge for a cataloger of a visual work is to consider all of these potential viewpoints. The cataloger must be observant and sort out what information about a work is relevant to include, and what elements are trivial or unnecessary to describe. It’s helpful to think of subject terms as the keywords used to conduct an image search. Catalogers have to anticipate future users’ research needs—which could be on a general subject or specific topic—and account for both when they are describing a work.

While there is no one standard governing the selection of subject tags, catalogers may choose subject terms from lists of pre-set subject identifiers known as controlled vocabularies. For cataloging the Experimental Printmaking Institute’s works, we selected four resources for subject terms: Getty’s Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) and Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), Iconclass, and Library of Congress Subject Headings. Each helps standardize the cataloging of visual resources by providing a controlled vocabulary to minimize variations in cataloging by different institutions.

My process for subject tagging the EPI works begins with identifying general terms and narrowing down from there. First I evaluate the work for major concepts and overall themes. Once those are established, I take a closer look at details in the image that seem important, such as an identifiable person, place, or event. Details do not necessarily have to be a focus of the work as a whole to merit being included–if a tag could be useful in helping someone locate an image of a particular subject, it may be worth including. However, it’s not a good idea to tag details that are truly a minor or irrelevant part of the image, since this could result in overemphasizing their importance.

An Example
Here’s how I approached cataloging “Taxes on Us Without Our Consent,” a screen print by Faith Ringgold.

“Taxes On Us Without Our Consent,” from Declaration of Freedom and Independence by Faith Ringgold

Continue reading →

Building the Digital Humanities

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Emily McGinn

Engineering student William Stathis interns with DSS

James Griffin, Digital Library Developer, and Billy Stathis ’15.

The first time I heard the term “digital humanities” was at a lecture from one of the field’s foremost authorities, Dr. Willard McCarty. He portrayed the field as a mixing of the classical humanities with new analytical technologies – mainly computation. This marriage of the quantitative and the qualitative may, at first, seem somewhat paradoxical. However, by using new analytical techniques and a bit of imagination on the part of both programmers and researchers, one can gain new insights.

Personally, my discovery of this field was a great excitement. As a current student of Electrical and Computer Engineering, I find very few opportunities to do work in history, which has been an interest of mine for years. As fate would have it, the head of Digital Scholarship Services, Eric Luhrs, was at the same lecture. He was looking for a summer intern to work on Digital Humanities collaborations with members of the Lafayette faculty. The internship would allow me, in a practical way, to combine my technical background with my interest in the humanities.

My initial time at DSS was spent learning new programming skills. After about two weeks of reading books on PHP, Javascript, and the Drupal framework, I was prepared to tackle the first project assigned to me. I had only worked on a software development team once before, and it was in the context of a class. Being free to use the best resources for the job, and not just those approved by a professor, was a nice change. Many of the new skills I learned are readily extensible to industry. In particular, the work-flow model we used was prevalent in startups and other small web based companies. This knowledge combined with my work fixing broken sections of code and adding new functionality via server-side and client-side processing will be valuable experience as I progress into a career.

Of all the projects that DSS is currently working on, I was primarily a part of The Easton Library Company Project. The ELC database is a collaboration between English professor Christopher Phillips and the Library’s Digital Scholarship Services department. Using a relational database of transcribed library loan records from the early 1800s, this project attempts to create an interactive model of the era’s social network. Organized in this way, the tools and records provide users with a means to analyze the reading trends, patron relationships, and other social aspects of life for those in and around Easton in the early 1800s. While the website is not yet publicly available, additional information can be seen at: http://digital.lafayette.edu/collections/eastonlibrary.

Billy Stathis at work on the ELC project

Overall, I found my time working at DSS educational. I gained some interesting knowledge of the digital humanities, which is also useful. Additionally, the website development experience I gained was invaluable for working with web and software companies. But my experience went beyond simple coding languages and coding practices. Most of all, I learned what a job in the software development world is actually like, and how to interact with a professional team of developers. I now feel that I have a much better idea of what development jobs hold in store and that will help guide me in my career search more than anything.