This is my third semester in the Digital Public Humanities Graduate Certificate Program. I plan to learn more about Digital Humanities from each course. I enjoy learning new methodologies and digital tools for engaging different audiences. While completing my coursework, I teach full-time for a two-year college. I teach First-Year Composition and American Literature courses. I hold a Bachelor of Science Degree in Biology, a Master’s Degree in English, and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric. I have not taught a full history course in a classroom; however, I do incorporate history into my First-Year Composition and American Literature courses because their reading assignments are centered on historical events, people, and places.
In addition to teaching, I am also responsible for coordinating events and workshops for Asian American and Middle Eastern American heritage programs. One of my ongoing research interests is folklore and how it helps us to understand the past and present. In studying and researching various aspects of folklore, I have learned the importance of preserving history and cultural heritage for American minority groups that tend to be forgotten or rarely shared with the rest of the American public. Although I do not have a strong academic background in history and/or library sciences, I would like to continue developing my skills as a digital humanities historian in order to research historical and cultural information about minority groups that needs to be shared with the audience in a digital space.
For HIST 689, I hope to learn something new and apply it to what I have already learned in the previous two courses by understanding how to teach history in my classes by using certain digital tools and learning how to be a better digital humanities historian. I hope to learn new theories about technology and teaching history and teaching methods on using digital tools/technology when presenting historical information online to a broader audience. Also, I would like to learn digital tools and teaching methods on how to teach my students to think like historians when it comes to conducting research for certain writing and multimodal projects.
For HIST 680, I created a project on Asian American History and Culture in the South. For HIST 694, I created a project on Koreatowns in North Texas. I used Omeka for both projects. Also, I collected majority of the sources for the both projects. In HIST 680, I learned to add items, create collections and exhibits, and add metadata. In HIST694, I learned more about persona and how it affects my perspective of audience engagement for future collaboration. I also learned to incorporate Oral History into my project. Evaluation is something on a working on for further development of my project site.
For both of my projects, conducting historical research with primary sources was an interesting challenge because I had difficulty finding available primary sources that pertain to my selected topics. However, creating and gathering the primary sources led me to a new path of understanding historical research because I had minimal knowledge or experience with historical research, especially pertaining to public history. Adding the metadata, narrative, and short descriptions challenged me to reconsider my broad audience in a very positive way. Working on my projects and learning new theories and methods have helped me to see how the graduate certificate program teaches us to apply historical thinking as an approach to learning and teaching history with technology. Historical thinking includes thinking about the actual primary and secondary sources in different layers of critical thinking, analysis, and evaluation. Furthermore, historical thinking involves more than the historian; instead, it includes a community of thinkers to “think” about the historical information by investigating new approaches and ideas in order to understand certain aspects of humanity and how history invites them to question things or issues. The graduate certificate program teaches the graduate students to understand the importance of becoming a digital humanities historian in order to help the audience think about history from different approaches in a time of advancing technology.
