Computing with Digital Media MSc postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The scanner at the library where I work has a habit of flattening pencil. When I digitise parish magazines from the 1920s, the printed columns come through crisply, but the pencilled notes readers added in the margins, such as corrections to names or a cross beside a wedding notice, often vanish into grey. Over the past year I have spent many evenings adjusting contrast settings and rescanning pages, and that small, stubborn problem has done more than anything else to make me want to study computing with digital media. I want to understand properly the systems I currently use by trial and error, and to build better ones.

My degree was in English Literature, and I came to digital work through texts rather than technology. For my final-year project I produced an online edition of a diary kept by a draper's apprentice in my home town in the 1890s, lent to me by the local history society. I transcribed around forty entries, wrote explanatory notes, and taught myself enough HTML and CSS to present the transcription beside images of each page, with notes that expanded when clicked. The result was modest, a static site of about a dozen pages, but my supervisor praised the clarity of its structure, and the society now links to it. The project taught me that editorial decisions and design decisions are often the same decision. Choosing whether to preserve the diarist's crossings-out, for example, meant deciding how a reader's eye should move across the screen.

Since graduating I have worked as a library assistant. Most of the role is ordinary: issuing books, helping people print boarding passes, running a fortnightly session for older residents learning to use tablets. That last task has been unexpectedly useful. Watching someone struggle to find a button that seems obvious to me has made me far more sceptical of interfaces that assume confidence. I have started keeping notes on where people get stuck, and I adjusted the handout I give them so that each step matches what they actually see on screen rather than what the manual describes.

To prepare for more technical study, I have been working through an introductory Python course in the evenings and have written a short script that renames and sorts our scanned files using the dates in their filenames, which saved my team a tedious afternoon each month. I have also read Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media, which helped me think about digital objects as modular and variable rather than as fixed copies of physical things. Its discussion of the database as a cultural form felt very close to my scanning work, where a single magazine becomes hundreds of separately searchable images. I recognise that my mathematical and programming foundations are still developing, and I am approaching that gap deliberately rather than hoping to avoid it.

Outside work I sing alto in a community choir. I mention it partly because it keeps me sane, but also because I now help manage our shared folder of rehearsal recordings and part files, which has given me a practical interest in how audio is compressed, labelled and found again.

At postgraduate level I hope to develop rigorous programming skills alongside a deeper understanding of how images, sound and text are represented and manipulated digitally. In the longer term I would like to work on digitisation and access projects for archives and libraries, where careful technical work can make neglected material genuinely usable. I bring patience with detail, experience of explaining technology to people who find it intimidating, and a humanities training that makes me ask who a system is for. I would now like the technical depth to act on those questions properly, starting, perhaps, with how to stop a scanner losing the pencil.