Digital Humanities [MSc] postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last month a visitor at the museum where I work asked why the touchscreen in our shipbuilding gallery could tell her the tonnage of every vessel launched from a particular yard but nothing about the men who riveted them. I explained that the data came from a launch register, and registers record ships rather than workers. She was not satisfied, and neither was I. That gap between what a source records and what a digital display seems to promise is the problem I want to study properly on a Digital Humanities MSc.

I graduated with a 2:1 in History, and my dissertation was the first time I treated archival material as data. I examined rent arrears disputes in Glasgow during the early 1920s, working from digitised council minutes and newspaper reports. I transcribed around four hundred addresses into a spreadsheet, cleaned inconsistent street names against historical Ordnance Survey maps, and plotted them in QGIS. The map showed clusters I had not expected along particular streets, which led me back to the minutes to look for tenants' associations operating there. Building the dataset taught me things no reading list had. Every decision about how to standardise an address or what to do with an illegible entry was an interpretive choice, and I kept a log of those choices in an appendix so a reader could see where the map was firm and where it rested on my judgement. My supervisor described that appendix as the most useful part of the project, and it is the habit I most want to develop further.

I taught myself QGIS through online tutorials and a great deal of trial and error, and I have since worked through an introductory Python course, using it to tidy a small set of museum visitor comments for a staff meeting. I am competent rather than fluent, and I would value structured teaching in programming, text encoding and database design so that my methods rest on more than whatever I managed to make work.

My job has shaped my interests as much as my degree. In visitor services I answer questions all day, and I notice which displays people trust and which they ignore. Visitors tend to treat anything on a screen as complete and authoritative, while they question a printed label more readily. That has made me think about interface design as part of historical argument, not decoration. I have also spent two years volunteering for an online project transcribing nineteenth-century parish registers. The work is slow and often tedious, but it has shown me how much depends on transcription guidelines, and how volunteers with different reading habits produce different results from the same page.

Outside work I play five-a-side every Wednesday and organise the group's fixtures and subs, which is the nearest I come to managing a database most weeks. It is a small responsibility, but keeping fourteen people informed and the money accounted for has made me reliable about record keeping in a way that carries over into research.

I am particularly interested in how cultural organisations can publish collections data honestly, showing gaps, biases and uncertainty rather than hiding them behind a polished interface. Johanna Drucker's argument that data should be understood as 'capta', something taken and constructed rather than simply given, matched what I had found in my dissertation, and I would like to test it against museum and archive practice. I hope to use the degree to move towards a role in digital collections or heritage data, where I could help build resources that answer the questions visitors actually ask, including the ones the original records were never designed to answer.