The very first issue of the Carleton Undergraduate Journal of Humanistic Studies is officially out! To access the journal, visit go.carleton.edu/ujhs. We are very excited to present eight pieces of scholarship from across the humanities disciplines. This project was the result of many hours of hard work and collaboration.
As a digital humanities project, this endeavor taught me many lessons about organization, collaboration, and planning. This journal has been a long time in the making, starting in the middle of last summer. Since that time, the project has taken on new members and grown significantly. We are currently accepting applications for next year’s editorial board and planning for the future.
Some of the greatest lessons I have learned from this project are as follows:
1. Organize, organize, organize! All projects must walk that fine line between details and the big picture. However, keeping documentation and having consistent policies made a huge difference in our process. We created a Google drive folder for our journal and started taking weekly meeting notes. This makes it easy to review what we have discussed and find our old notes.
2. Know when to set details aside. There were times when discussions about very specific points set our meetings back and we ended up spending a long time thinking about a minor issue. It’s important to keep these issues in mind but sometimes necessary to abandon them in order to keep things moving.
3. Seek help. We had lots of extremely productive conversations with our faculty advisors and research librarians. These conversations helped us better understand the process and provided us with valuable insight.
4. Communication is key. We experimented with different ways of communicating with our guest editors and making sure that all of our papers were edited on time. We are still trying to figure out the best way to ensure that deadlines are met.
5. Delegate. When we divided the work amongst ourselves, we had much greater success. Particularly with the copy editing process at the end of the project, delegation proved extremely helpful.
This project has proved to be an exciting part of my undergraduate career and I am so excited to see where the journal goes in the future!
