Last week was spring break, and as much as possible, I gave myself permission to step away from the Mapping Cemeteries project. I’m not sure how much I was able to enjoy my break from the project as I spent a lot of that time overthinking all of the work yet to be done, but I’m feeling good with my decision overall. And I feel more excited to come back to the project this week and deliver some deliverables.
Based on a class last semester–in which we had several very fruitful discussions when everyone tried to define “what is digital humanities?” and “what is text?”–I had an idea that everyone in our group should try and answer “what is Mapping Cemeteries?” As I suspected, we all came up with very different answers, and they’re all fantastic. We’re featuring this content on our Commons site homepage so readers can get an idea of the conversations we’re having as we create the project. We also hope our readers will join us in this conversation (we’ve turned on Hypothesis on every page of the site).
I also found some very interesting articles about COVID and the deathscape in New York City published by THE CITY. I’ve added all of them to our What We’re Reading page with Hypothesis links in the hopes that our readers will also engage with us here. Two of the articles focus on Hart Island, which isn’t a location we’re covering specifically in our initial phase of the project, but it is such a prominent part of the deathscape in the city (being the largest mass grave of its kind in the United States). In many ways these articles about Hart Island and the uncounted COVID deaths in city prisons reflect one of our aims, which is to make visible deaths that are treated as invisible and unimportant and create space for reflection, care, and memorialization.
[This entry was originally posted to DHUM 70002 Digital Humanities: Methods and Practices (Spring 2021) in Personal Blogs and tagged mapping cemeteries, Personal Blog on April 6, 2021 by Brianna Caszatt.]
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