Over the course of my academic and professional career, I developed a lot of practical project management skills. Breaking down big projects into manageable tasks allowed me to accomplish an inventory of hundreds of paintings, crafting exhibit labels for a public history exhibit, and turning my master’s thesis into a published article. More importantly, none of these projects were done in a vacuum, and I could not have accomplished any of this without my mentors, supervisors, peers, and archivists who helped along the way. Just as Gabrielle Griffin and Matthew Steven Hayler point out in our readings this week, I want to dissuade from focusing on only the “lone humanities scholar” because collaboration is essential to producing scholarship and working in the professional field.1
In my own career, the best instance of project management that truly helped me develop as a professional historian was taking a Public History Practicum at Villanova University. My professor steered the course but also gave us the space to develop our interests in curating an exhibit in collaboration with the University’s Art Gallery. My class curated the exhibit, Dox Thrash: Painted, Not Printed which examined pieces of a well-known 20th century African American printmaker who worked in Philadelphia. We provided historical context for Thrash’s life through his lesser-known paintings, along with analysis of some of the works of his peers and the artistic communities in Philadelphia at that time. Just like our exercises in class on Monday, we used project management skills (mainly Microsoft Teams) to share files in a collective space and engage with peers as we developed the exhibit.
Looking back on my previous project management experiences, with the new context I gained from our readings this week, made me stop and think about all the times technology was an essential collaborator in my work. Griffin and Hayler both analyzed not only human-human collaborations, but human-machine interactions as essential collaborations for a twenty-first century historian, and they are right to do so!2 Edin Tabak also argues that we need to have transparency when discussing research projects and project management, so I will now shift over to my reflections on our technological exercises in class, acknowledging how the digital space acted as an adept collaborator with Basecamp.3
I had never heard of Basecamp prior to our tech exercises in class, and I really appreciated that is easy to use, and it helped with working with collaborators on a project. My group had a really great discussion of our research interests, and we were able to gel everything together into an idea for an engaging digital history project! With Basecamp, we were able to draft our ideas, and a project timeline right there as we discussed everything together. So, by using this digital software we had a record of our progress so far, and a step-by-step plan for the rest of the semester. Without those tools, our conversation could easily have been lost in the ether, or specific ideas forgotten after class ended. Along with the to-do list and Message board, all the files could be kept in that same shared Basecamp folder. This one-stop-shop collaborative space stunned me. A lot of my research projects were built out of scrappy self-made plans to visit archives or other research institutions, so I was not sure how this software and working with a team on a project like this would work. All my anxieties were assuaged when I began talking with my peers and working with Basecamp. It really was a good mix between human-human interactions and human-machine interactions.
1 Gabrielle Griffin and Matthew Steven Hayler, “Collaboration in Digital Humanities Research- Persistent Silences,” Digital Humanities Quarterly Vol. 12 No. 1 (2018) accessed September 16, 2026.
https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/12/1/000351/000351.html
2 Griffin and Hayler, “Collaboration in Digital Humanities Research”
3 Edin Tabak, “A Hybrid Model for Managing DH Projects,” Digital Humanities Quarterly Vol. 11, No. 1 (2017) accessed September 16, 2026, https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/11/1/000284/000284.html
Hi Lena, I appreciated how you talked about project management in your blog post by drawing on your professional experiences outside of the classroom. I had been introduced to Basecamp while working on a previous project, but I had never used it for one of my own projects – and I think it’s going to be really useful!
Hello Lena, I really enjoyed the positive and comprehensive way you described group work and teamwork. I am glad that you have had such positive experiences in this area. My own positive experiences with teamwork have mostly involved academic projects, specifically, working on papers with the help of librarians and professors and using digital tools.
Hi Lena, I really appreciated your public history perspective in this post: though no humanities scholar truly works alone, the public humanities—both material and digital—rely heavily on group collaborative efforts. In my undergraduate “Public History In Action” course, my project exhibit group communicated through Discord and struggled to maintain consistent document-sharing practices because we had no communal drive. Despite these shortcomings, we produced a vibrant exhibit showcasing traditional and contemporary Indigenous art and craftsmanship from communities across North and South America. After being introduced to Basecamp for the first time last week in class (and playing around with it to figure out all the features), I am excited that a singular platform can support multiple elements of project management: group communication, document sharing, long-term planning, and much more. I wonder how the benefits of using Basecamp will manifest in our final projects!
Hi Lena! Thank you for sharing the link to the Dox Thrash project; it seems like it was a really interesting exhibit! Sharing and comparing your previous project management work against the assigned readings gives a lot of perspective on what you took away from class. After having read the articles for this week, would you consider doing anything differently if you were to work on a similar exhibition?