My, how the days have passed. Coming into this class, Research Methods in Digital Humanties, I did not fully know what to expect. I suppose I thought we would be conducting scads of literary research and writing papers. It’s actually what I’m most used to at the college level, and I was prepared to be unsurprised by the information taught in this class. After all, I’ve been doing lit reviews now for years. However, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at how much I actually learned.

True, at the beginning of the semester, I found some of the material to be a review. What is digital humanities? What is research? These seemed like questions I had already asked and answered myself years ago. To answer them again was trivial.

However, as the weeks went on, we began to dissect actual research into more than just literary understanding. We looked into HOW researchers conducted their research, not just their findings. This was not something I was particularly familiar with, and I found the study of methodology to be incredibly interesting.

There were a few setbacks though to my full adoption of this new knowledge.

For example, the initial foray into Python and other coding languages was confusing and unfriendly. Perhaps a pre-requisite to Research Methods would be a class on Python, or at the very least Professor Stolley’s Standards-Based Web Design course – something that would have just enough use of the terminal and GitHub to have a basic understanding of what we are viewing on-screen during Research Methods. Luckily, I took Prof. Stolley’s class and did not have as difficult a time using GitHub as other students. However, Python was a real heel and I honestly wish I had a better grasp of the language in order to take advantage of some of the methods we learned in class, like textual analysis.

Which brings me to my next point: the final project was somewhat difficult to digest. We were told to select a project long before I knew what was possible to research. An example would be how we learned to automatically extract data from Twitter’s API using Google Docs about three weeks after we needed to decide what we wanted to study. I didn’t even know that it was POSSIBLE to extract data from Twitter that easily, or even what an API was at the time I was choosing my topic.

I feel like this knowledge would have been helpful in the beginning of the class in order to establish some sort of hierarchical interest in one method over another. Instead, I felt like I was floundering around trying to find the best way to conduct research into what I wanted to understand, not really knowing how I was going to achieve any kind of result. As we continued to learn new methodologies, I continued to not just revise, but completely change my project topic. This occured no less than five times in two months. Needless to say, it was not an entirely efficient way to conduct, analyze, and synthesize new research.

Overall, I really value what I learned in this class. Insight into research methodologies as they pertain to my field of Digital Humanities will be incredibly useful, especially as I develop my capstone project. However, I feel somewhat unhappy with my final project, in that I was not really provided an adequate ratio of information to time in order to complete a robust, in-depth, satisfactory body of data and appropriate digital artifact.