The following piece was originally created for the DH@MSU Newsletter and was featured in the February 28, 2023 issue. Subscribe to the Newsletter here.
What Digital Humanities Means to Me: Kuhu Tanvir
I’m an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities through the English department and the Film Studies program, and what that has meant over the last (almost) three years is opportunities to teach classes at the intersection of film and media. The number of departments and programs listed in my job title alone symbolizes the truly multidisciplinary nature of Digital Humanities. For the longest time, and perhaps to an extent even now, I’ve hesitated to think about what Digital Humanities is because it feels like a trick question, one with no satisfying answer. After observing the range of work that faculty and students affiliated with DH@MSU do, however, I’ve come to think of the discipline’s unsure boundaries as its strength rather than a shortcoming. DH as a discipline and as a program at MSU is as productive as it is because it is now comfortable with being in a constant state of emergence, of coming into being.
I’ve taught one DH course every year, and the breadth and openness of this discipline has meant that I got to teach a course in “adaptions” wherein we engaged with two meanings of the word: one, technological adaptations for people with disabilities, and two, textual adaptations. While these two seem to be quite distinct from one another, when studied under the aegis of Digital Humanities, we got to think through “textual” and “technological” as overlapping terms. The following year I taught a course on Media Archives, and had students from Film Studies, Creative Writing, History, and German to name a few. Each student brought their own archival interests to the class while also debating the politics of archiving and historiography in an increasingly mediated world.
While my training and primary interests are in the critical examination of theories and concepts of media and culture, my aim with each of my Digital Humanities courses is to include some practical element that allows students to engage more closely with actual media. In the archives course for instance, we did “labs” where students picked areas of interest and then did a digital deep dive looking for primary material on that subject.
This semester, I’m teaching a mobile media course which began with examining the Walkman—which I located on eBay—as a mobile technology. One of the subsequent sessions was on mobile gaming, for which I made my students play Pokemon Go. To share their embarrassment at playing this already outdated game, I decided to join them, and now I am hooked. So, if you see a woman clumsily trying to walk two dogs while also trying to hit pokemon on her phone screen, there’s a good chance that’s me!