Difficulties of Critiquing

Throughout the class, we have been discussing how Digital Humanities projects can and have been critiqued by scholars throughout the last few years. There are myriad projects out there and even more in development, but when it comes to critiquing, evaluating, and judging these projects, it seems that the opinions vary as widely as the projects. This brings me to our most recent class in which we premiered the homemade videos we each were tasked with creating.

It seems I should have worn something fancier.

The process of making the research video was arduous and tedious, but the results (at least in my case) were something that I can be proud of.  I had figured that showing my video in class was going to be the most nerve-racking part of the entire experience--and it was, for the most part. As the video began, I was seriously nervous, but when the audience (our class) actually laughed at the comedic parts of the video, my tension began to dissipate. All in all, the premiering experience was frightening but rather fun.  I think it was especially eased because it seemed that the class actually enjoyed the video and had very few critiques.

Although I had predicted that the toughest part of the whole project would actually be putting the movie together in Movie Maker, critiquing other people's work was definitely much more difficult. This is definitely where I had my failure of the week, and I had the realization that evaluating other people's work is much harder than it sounded.

I'm an English instructor, so I'm more than accustomed to giving constructive criticism but that is primarily on freshmen composition papers. While watching my classmates' research videos, I wasn't able to come up with criticisms other than the most basic or obvious such as those that the director him/herself already described or what others had said. Additionally, the only person's video I actually felt comfortable critiquing as far as content was concerned was Justin's since he and are both Anglo-Saxonists and close friends.  Since I already knew the material he was covering in the presentation, it seemed more appropriate to evaluate his video rather than the others since I know little about their research interests. That brings up the question in my mind of whether or not those who could be evaluating potential projects on my horizon will feel the same way I do about judging my colleagues' work.