After spending the semester reading about the theoretical, ethical, and pedagogical approaches to digital humanities scholarship, I was eager to put my learning into practice. In conceiving of my final project, I felt overwhelmed by the possibilities available to me: initially, I was interested in writing a paper about participation as a fulcrum upon which DH sits, demanding public engagement while also interrogating public contributions to DH scholarship. After attending Software for Artists Day at Pioneer Works, I couldn’t stop thinking about a project I’d seen at the event: the creators of BannerDepot2000 explained how their website could create poems using a random selection of web ad banners from the 1990’s. They showed me an example, and proclaimed, “here’s a poem!”. Their certainty made me uneasy. How did they know that this random collection of text was a poem? Who gets to decide what can be qualified as poetry? My reflections on the randomly generated poem inspired me to pivot my final project away from a paper and towards an interactive interpretive tool for poetry online. I wanted to test how people decide that something has literary meaning. Are we always looking for meaning, category, and symbolism? Is interpretation inevitable? In constructing my project, I also thought about a symposium I attended at the NYU Center for the Humanities in September called “Re-Interpretation: Hermeneutics in the Age of AI” which called into question how artificial text and cultural outputs will challenge and change our understanding of interpretation. I wanted to revisit some of the questions raised in this symposium, and thought that my project might allow for a more in-depth look at authorship and meaning in relation to text. 

I decided to pursue a project that used public records as the basis of poetic generations, hoping to critique how we regard bureaucratic language as having a singular interpretive purpose. By invoking the carceral system, I also wanted to explore the political and literary consequences of censorship: since this is a topic I work closely with through my job, I wanted to apply a more critical lens to the mechanisms of cultural censorship. While writing my narrative, I found that the environmental scan most helped me to clarify my project’s purpose. In researching other projects that questioned poetic form, found poetry, and repurposed language, I was able to develop a much stronger critical framework for my proposal. Instead of feeling intimidated by other projects — as I’d expected to feel — I was encouraged by other people’s work to trace back threads of inquiry that I might not have thought were important otherwise. 

The part of my final project proposal that leaves me with questions still is the actual execution of the project. While it’s simple to imagine a website, the technical skill that will go into creating a website is beyond my scope. Even though I identified programmers as part of my project staff, I am still not really sure what those programmers will do: what coding language will be most effective? How will text actually be scraped from digital, public records? Although I don’t have the coding skills to create a website right now, I hope that, over the course of the next semester, I can learn more about how to write code so that I can be a better project teammate in the future.