By Charlie Schufreider ’17 and Alex Simrell ’16
Friday afternoons on Fenwick 4 tend to be dominated by the Holy Cross Manuscripts, Inscriptions, and Documents (MID) Club. Yet last Friday, August 6, the club’s presence was reduced just a bit, as four of its members traveled to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, home of Bucknell University. There Claude Hanley ‘18, Stephanie Neville ‘17, Charlie Schufreider ‘17, and Alex Simrell ’16 attended the Bucknell Undergraduate Digital Scholarship Conference. Fearing to miss our 2 p.m. Sophocles seminar, the team didn’t depart until 3:30 on Friday afternoon. This left us battling Hartford rush hour traffic, rubberneckers all along I-84, and indigestion from Oreo overindulgence.
After a late night arrival at the Country Inn and Suites, the team arose with the sun in order to run over the final details of our presentation before the conference breakfast, for which we were first in line. Our talk was part of the panel titled, “Student Success through Digital Scholarship Initiatives.” Our talk, which followed two presentations by administrators about their respective undergraduate research programs, offered an example of the type of work that can be accomplished when undergraduates are given ample opportunity. For it focused not only on the structure of the MID Club, but it also highlighted our recent summer research on the Venetus A manuscript of Homer’s Iliad.
For the abstract to our presentation, click here: http://dsconf.blogs.bucknell.edu/2015/09/14/digital-editions-of-primary-documents-a-collaborative-modern-approach-to-ancient-texts/
We were pleased by the overwhelmingly positive response to our presentation. Audience members expressed genuine interest in our club, and many even asked how to create such a dedicated research club on their own campuses. What really amazed us was the incredible response all over the Twitter-verse (the hashtag of the conference was #BUDSC15; our Twitter handle is @HCMID). It certainly made for fun reading as we, with lightened hearts, re-embarked to make our seven-hour trek back to Worcester. So now, the Friday after our adventure, we return to Fenwick 4 to resume our studies of manuscripts, inscriptions, and documents, carrying on the tradition we represented the Friday before.
