As I mentioned in my introduction, my first encounter with Digital Humanities was through HUMN 100: Digging Into the Digital my Freshman year. The class was a project based class designed to introduce students to DH tools and thinking, using Tarlton’s Jests as the core text. Tarlton’s Jests is one of the few remaining sources that document the life of Richard Tarlton (1530?-1588), one of the most famous and popular actors in early Elizabethan theater.
Some DH projects that we did include: mapping Tarlton’s journies using ArcGIS online, TEI and XML text encoding of the digitalized source, and Voyant for textual analysis. Each time we turned in our assignments, we wrote reflection posts to critique and think about the process. Reading through them now four years later really helps me appreciate not only how far I’ve come in my career as a Digital Humanist, but also the cultivation of my skills afforded to me so early on by Prof. Jakacki.
Without Prof. Jakacki I would probably not have become a DH minor. She has been crucial not only for fostering my DH training but also she has been a consistent and reliable force my whole academic career. I owe her a lot for emotional support throughout the years and for always having confidence in my abilities. I will miss her a lot.