Data and Digital Humanities postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most of the books donated to the public library where I work are clean, but a few arrive covered in pencil. Last winter I sorted a box of second-hand novels that had belonged to one reader, who had underlined passages, dated each finished book and written short verdicts on the endpapers. Library policy meant they went to the sale table, but before they did I typed the dates and comments into a spreadsheet, partly out of curiosity. Laid out in rows, thirty years of one person's reading showed patterns no single book could: long gaps, returns to favourite authors, a shift from thrillers to travel writing. That small exercise sums up why I want to study data and digital humanities. I am interested in what becomes visible when cultural material is structured, and in what is lost when it is.

I studied English Literature, and my dissertation examined how serial fiction was presented in provincial Victorian newspapers. Using a digitised newspaper archive, I tracked instalments of several stories reprinted across regional titles, recording where they appeared on the page and what surrounded them. The work taught me more about digitised sources than I expected. Optical character recognition errors meant keyword searches missed instalments, so I learned to search for common misreadings and to check results against page images. I recorded everything in a structured spreadsheet and taught myself enough Python to count and compare placements across titles. The code was basic, but it let me show that reprinted fiction often sat beside advertising rather than editorial content, which shaped my argument about how readers met these stories. My supervisor's main criticism was that I had not said enough about what the archive left out, such as titles never digitised. I agreed, and that question of the gaps behind a collection is one I want to explore properly.

Since graduating I have worked as a library assistant. Much of my job is ordinary: issuing books, shelving, helping people print documents and use the public computers. I also process donations and correct catalogue records, which has made me attentive to metadata. I have seen how an inconsistent author name or a missing date can make a book effectively invisible to someone searching the catalogue. I keep a list of recurring problems and pass it to the cataloguing team, and some fixes have been adopted for local records. Helping older users with online forms has also shown me how much digital access depends on design and confidence, not just availability.

Outside work I sing alto in a community choir, where I help keep our sheet music library in order, and every Thursday I do the shopping for a neighbour who no longer drives. Neither connects neatly to this course, though both have made me reliable and organised, which matters when part-time work and study run alongside each other.

My reading has helped me frame these experiences. Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees persuaded me that counting and mapping can raise new literary questions, while Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein's Data Feminism made me think about who collects data, whose experience it records and whose it omits. I find the tension between those books productive rather than something to resolve.

At postgraduate level I want to build proper technical skills in text analysis, data management and visualisation, and to learn the critical methods needed to use them responsibly. I would particularly like to work with digitised periodicals or library records, examining how collection and cataloguing decisions shape what researchers can find. Longer term, I hope to work in digital collections within libraries or archives, where literary training and technical ability can make collections more accessible and more honest about their limits. I bring a careful approach to sources, practical experience of messy records and genuine curiosity about the patterns ordinary reading leaves behind.