My name is Karmen Browitt. I’m originally from a small town in Nebraska, but I’ve lived in Lincoln for about six years. Currently, I am a German Language and Literature Master's at UNL. In May 2020, I graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and majored in English and German.

I also got a minor in Digital Humanities (DH), so I’ve had a lot of exposure to DH classes. Given that DH is an interdisciplinary field, these classes have varied from English to Anthropology to Computer Science. Minoring in DH exposed me to classes that were focused more on the technical side of DH, while other classes were based on theory and asking the big questions. More than once, I’ve taken classes where our end goal was to produce a grant proposal that follows the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) guidelines. These project proposals exposed me to grant writing and will be useful if I ever need to write a grant in the future.

Another idea that I’ve been exposed to while taking DH classes is the idea of minimal computing. After learning about it, I became interested in how minimal computing affects sustainability and accessibility. Throughout this semester, I’d like to delve more into minimal computing to better understand what it all entails. When developing satellite projects for One More Voice, this will be the main thing that drives my motivations and decisions for the project.

Before coming into my current graduate program (German Literature), I received a master’s in Business Analytics. This program was great because it taught me a lot of technical skills that apply to my future work in DH. We worked a lot with coding, particularly with R and SQL. I know there’s debate in DH right now about how R can be used (or cannot be used) within the field, and I’d like to explore this idea more throughout the semester!

One critique I have of my last program is that many times when we were working with data sets, we were expected to only look at the results and pull conclusions based on that. It was almost like we were expected to just inherently trust that the data had been meticulously collected and was correct. I had questioned where they pulled the data from, but it wasn’t until last semester, during one of my DH classes, that I had realized this was a problematic way of thinking, especially since data collection can have inherent biases. With this in mind, I will be very conscious about the types of datasets or materials I use when creating the satellite projects for this class.