Hi, hello! My name is Megan Doherty, and I am a junior French major and Elementary Education minor at Washington and Lee University. I recently teamed up with Professor Stephen McCormick and became a Digital Humanities Fellow, which means that I’ll be spending a lot of time working on the Huon d’Auvergne project (http://www.huondauvergne.org/) featured under our handy little “Projects” tab at the top.
My interest in digital humanities work really developed this summer when I stumbled upon a job working with Professor Sarah Horowitz and her project on the Steinheil Affair (https://sarahehorowitz.com/). I went into that project knowing absolutely nothing about how humanities could be integrated with technology. Honestly, it never even dawned on me that the two could merge at all. However, after spending an entire summer learning how my computer can sometimes read texts better than I can, a truly humbling experience, I came to the realization that digital humanities was the future of my own academic career. Now, I sit in all of my classes and think about ways digital humanities could provide a deeper and more complex understanding of the material. Everything I read has suddenly become an opportunity for some sort of text analysis project, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
This newly found perspective on humanities work has influenced my ideas for a senior thesis involving medieval literature, LGBTQ relationships, and lots and lots of text analysis. I am so very grateful for the Digital Humanities department here at Washington and Lee for giving me these outstanding opportunities.