The Digital Studies minor at UMW has helped me gain skills including blogging platforms, website design, audio editing, interactive storytelling, and text analysis. But beyond that, Digital Studies also means thinking about how we manifest our identities online, how information is disseminated with digital tools, the cultures that emerge from these opportunities, and the ethical and philosophical questions that this presents.
Here are a few of the projects that showcase my digital skills:
- The Starless Night – Interactive creative writing for Digital Studies 101, made with Twine.
- Mapping American Realism – A foray into digital literary studies for my Digital Studies 101 class. An interactive map of novels studied in one of my English classes, made with TimeMapper.
- Social Media and Addictive Design – A ten-minute podcast made with Garage Band for Digital Studies 101.
- A Walk Through St. Petersburg – A personal interactive map, made with Storymap JS for Dr. Jeff McClurken’s Adventures in Digital History class.
- 50 Years of Star Trek – A timeline made in Timeline JS for Adventures in Digital History.
- Farmer Timeline: The Mary Washington Years. As part of a group effort to honor civil rights leader James Farmer and his legacy at Mary Washington, I created this multimedia exhibit in TimelineJS. Completed as part of Adventures in Digital History.
- James Farmer’s Lectures. Over the course Digital History, I also had the opportunity to transcribe and caption three archival recordings of Dr. Farmer’s lectures, enabling them to be shown to the public for the first time.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Fansite. For Dr. Zach Whalen’s Applied Digital Studies class, we were challenged to code a simple HTML web page that intentionally imitated the aesthetics of nineties Geocities-style personal webpages. I opted for timeline-appropriate subject matter.
- Changes in Web Culture and Independent Online Art: A Case Study in Webcomics. A formal research project for Applied Digital Studies, focusing on the way trends in funding and social media culture have changed webcomics over the past few decades.
- Digital Collages. A series of fantastical landscapes made in Adobe Photoshop for my final project in Professor Jason Robinson’s Digital Approaches to Fine Arts class.
- Where Light Doesn’t Die. A hypertext-based nonfiction memoir written for Dr. Whalen’s Electronic Literature class.