My discussion posts
Introductions: Denise Raftery
27 Sep 2021 20:00
Wow girls,
Ye are not just ladies who lunch … what a group of skilled experts with so much to offer!
This is my second tour of UCC as I completed a H.Dip in Advanced Languages and Global Communication her in 2019. I had the joy of learning Manderin Chinese and Italian for the first time and upgrading my Spanish alongside ICT localisation and digital translation modules.
Previously I had spent 40 Septembers in multiple classrooms with returning learners those doing time! Now it’s my turn again. On Friday I just submitted my final portfolio pieces for a film production course in Connemara, hence my slow start here. Incredibly I am a ‘digital sceptic’ but I keep pushing myself forward into these taster zones. As I said to Mike on day one, I am not sure I am on the right course. Is that really a valid title ‘digital humanitarian’?
I look forward to learning so much from all of you who have had such positive experiences in the realm of DAH.
On me as I see myself in the DAH learning space (added Dec 13th from reflective journal)
I have come to a stage in life where I have moved beyond my professional career and have begun the adventure of the final decades of my life. I am attempting to have the most meaningful experience that I can have and that led to an unexpected turn into print journalism at the beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic in 2019. A thoughtful article I wrote was accepted by two editors and subsequently published. ‘As way leads on to way’, (Frost Robert), I took another unexpected detour into a Media Production Traineeship which in turn led to a work experience, involving a summer weekly feature piece in a local newspaper over seven weeks. Then came an unexpected opportunity to study at UCC an advance my experience into the digital sphere.
I can’t pretend to be a scholar nor do I aspire to be one. The opportunity to participate on this course is, in my ‘Frostian’ analogy, an opportunity to ‘come back’ and to tread the second untrodden path, the road not travelled as a result of my choices in earlier life!
I am excited by the idea of building a domain and I take the instruction of O’Sullivan. (394). seriously where he counsels that “everything you disseminate should be a reflection of your identity”, except I don’t see my identity going forward as an academic. Digital platforms are he says “an opportunity to tell your own research story” and he advises the ‘taking of control’ and not allowing “Google, Yahoo and Bing to create your identity for you.” This warning he attributes to Kellie Marshall. (394).
Up to now I have had no digital footprint or social media presence and I guard my privacy jealously! However, I have turned down the “road not travelled” and gone public with some of my writing so I have now a footprint through a media organisation if nothing else. This course is giving me an opportunity to learn about the Digital Arts and Humanities and to hopefully build a “biographically and professionally consistent” domain with “compelling content” from my creative self over my lifetime so far and into the future. It is as a ‘creative’ that I will be carefully treading the boards of the digital world, being conscious as O’Sullivan advises “of the public space in which it (my work) resides”. (394).
Glenn Most outlines this due care and attention which is required in collation as he details the sculpture of the work of the Chinese partnership, the reader and the corrector as he concludes that what is at stake is “not only the world, the nation and the future of mankind –but also his own career”. (165). I was delighted that Most referenced the collation of oral and aural traditions as what I am terming my ‘creative’, embodies poetry, song, theatre, recordings and performance pieces and most recently memoir which is my retelling of life in an Irish town through my own stories or family lore.
Having written verse over a lifetime I am so well aware of the absence of a single version in many cases. Of course, I do have what I consider the final version. But should I revisit that a few years hence I find myself editing again. ‘The edition’, Most proposes, might be the one, I one day “take out of the archive and bring to market”. (168).
References
Frost, Robert, Louis Untermeyer, and Robert Frost. The Road Not Taken: A Selection of Robert Frost’s Poems. New York: H. Holt and Co, 1991. Print. 7th edition
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/59824/pg59824-images.html#THE_ROAD_NOT_TAKEN
Most, G. W. 2016. What is a Critical Edition? In: Crostini, B., Iversen, G. and Jensen, B. M. (eds.) Ars Edendi Lecture Series, vol. IV. Pp. 162–180. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16993/baj.g. License: CC-BY 4.
O’Sullivan, James. Long, Christopher. P. and Mattson, Mark. A. ‘Dissemination as Cultivation, Scholarly communications in a digital age’. In: ’Doing Digital Humanities, Practice, Training, Research’. Edited by Constance Crompton, Richard J. Lane and Ray Siemens. London and New York: Routledge, 2016
