Hello, everyone. I am Lydia Pensel, a second-year PhD student at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. I predominantly study European history, with an emphasis on British history. My experience with digital humanities is relatively limited. The only experience I have outside of the Introduction to Digital Humanities course I took last semester is as the coordinator of the undergraduate podcasting project in my department.

Regarding what interests me in public digital humanities, I am interested in almost every aspect of utilizing and creating digital humanities projects. I have been well versed in technology since I was a young child, and digital humanities provides me the means of combining my two loves, history and technology. Beyond this, I am a staunch advocate for public history because, as an educator, I aim to share my knowledge in an accessible way with the general public to create connections and share information. Both of my parents are educators, so almost every vacation I took as a child included some form of a museum or historical site, which means that public history is deeply ingrained in my life. My learning goals for this semester are relatively simple: to better understand the significance of public history and how digital public history can be disseminated to everyone in an accessible and easy-to-understand manner. I also want to fully understand what public history entails and discover what projects I can use in the future, especially when I finish my PhD.

I look forward to this semester and the valuable information I will learn.