A Goal | Do 'the Risky Thing' in Digital Humanities

The case for why a graduate student should take a chance on an innovative project—a dissertation in film studies that builds its argument in both video and text form, for instance, or a project that uses geospatial technologies to map literary movements—is pretty straightforward: Real innovation requires risk. Writing a standard dissertation that meets everyone’s expectations for what a dissertation should look like, how it should argue, and what it should say is the safe path to a completed degree. But having taken that path—the path to a book—the candidate is likely to find herself on the job market with dozens of other Ph.D. holders with prospective books. Getting her work out of the pile is helped enormously by having done something more than what was expected. That is not to push experimentation for experimentation’s sake, but it is to say that reining in a project a graduate student really wants to do to conform with a traditional structure is counterproductive, deflating both the student’s passion and the thing that makes her work distinctive.

A goal.

J N O M I C S