These posts have proven hard for me to write each week – not for lack of something worthwhile to share from our group work – but because of how all of our work this semester has been running parallel to and embedded in a constant series of world events that are both hard to ignore and hard to appropriately connect in a manner that does not feel trite or disregarding. I have felt the heaviness of the wider world hang over trying to compose each of these.

I realized this week that I am looking forward to the summer for rest, clearly, but also to have time to reflect on what the next phase of this project will look like with less rushed consideration of some of our choices, particularly around outreach. I am not sure I will know everything I’ve learned this year until I am no longer consciously thinking about it and the lessons have time to settle and find their own rearticulating.

Prizing a fast pace has been a benefit at many stages but has also been something I’ve questioned. In the process, I have come to wonder about DH theories on pacing and structure of planning projects in the field. I am thinking of the intentionality of process in design thinking models. Or inquiry-driven teaching models with their four phases (Interaction, Clarification, Questioning, and Design). And at the end, reflection is critical before engaging in the next phase or iteration. Of course, we have in many ways followed this sort of model with the balance of our time spent on Design so it may just be that reflection is what’s called for and right on schedule.

The idea of failing quickly and often, and expecting to do so, and not just recovering, but rather building joyfully out of failure is one of those DH themes that has been on my mind a lot. So too are questions of voice, access, inclusion, representation, and absence. Few of these things are served by haste, but haste has helped us build a platform into which these values can be constructed. I believe that in the site’s current form, we as a group have already created something truly meaningful and worthwhile. And among the many things I am grateful for – beyond the most important thing, which is our team (just made up of the best people) – is that its current scale also still allows for modification to structure and design that will make it even more deeply mission consistent before growing consumed with processing and managing data.

It will be helpful and healthy to formalize reflections in the form of our end-of-term papers, and to tie them to the DH values we worked through in the spring. I’m genuinely looking forward to that process, rather than dreading that final paper – yet another thing to be grateful for!