Rose Kottwitz
Hello! My name is Rose Kottwitz! I’m a senior English major with minors in Business and Digital Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I work as a consultant at the University’s Writing Center and as an intern with Prairie Schooner. Additionally, I am an editor with Laurus, the University’s undergraduate literary magazine, and am Editor-in-Chief of Semitas Magazine, which aims to publish new and emerging writers.
I identify as a white, able, middle-class woman from the Midwestern United States. I have worked in the past on the George Eliot Archive, aiding efforts in making the John Cross Collection (link opens in new tab) of correspondence available to the public for free in order to aid the research of those studying George Eliot and her correspondence, as well as any others who may be interested in her life or work. I have also worked to encode and digitize a selection from an early 20th-century book by an unknown female-identifying author entitled Autobiography of a Happy Woman (link opens in new tab) that spoke of the struggles of working women at that time and encouraged women to unite in forming unions and taking other actions to improve their experience as working women.
Each of these projects has exposed me to the digital humanities in different ways. While my digitization work focused on exposing me to the technical aspects of some of the basic languages and programs often used in the encoding and digitization of texts, my work on the George Eliot Archive exposed me primarily to the importance of equitable access to information. Information should not be intentionally or unintentionally withheld from any group of people due to issues of finances, internet connection, or language. From a scholarly perspective, the withholding of information from any group can result in a lack of advancement within a discipline and a lack of diversity in the voices contributing to a discipline, a diversity that is necessary to gain the most holistic view of any discipline and ensure that no minority groups are excluded from study. Furthermore, from a more general perspective, lack of access to information can lead to groups of people being unable to contribute or withheld from contributing to contemporary conversations that impact everyone. As such, I am a firm believer in the importance of access in any digital humanities project.
In the future, I want to explore more ways to improve access in my digital humanities projects and consider more barriers to access as I design my projects. I also want to learn more about minority experiences and help expose the works of minoritized people that have gone largely unrecognized throughout Western colonial history. I’m particularly interested in learning about the experiences of minoritized peoples in the United States and North America as a whole. Finally, I welcome constructive criticism that will help me grow as a digital humanist. I hope you enjoy my website!
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