Something that hit me as I was finishing up this project was how far I have come since my first year of college. My roommate made a comment about how good of a writer I was when she was proofreading my critical introduction and it really made me pause. When I entered college, I was really unconfident in my writing skills, carrying some baggage from high school English teachers. Yet, over the past four years and my time as a Humanities student, I have grown to love my own writing and recognize that I am pretty good at it! The thought of trying to accomplish a project of this magnitude at the beginning of my college career would have been extremely overwhelming, but at this point in my career, I saw it as a fun way to show off my skills. 

Since the text I used was not from the course syllabus, I knew that I would be adding some extra work to my plate and I am so happy that I did. Danquah’s memoir is honestly now my favorite book and this project was able to spark a bigger passion for patient narratives that I will be expanding on in a bigger capstone project (which also fits in nicely with my future career path). This project has been a unique way to demonstrate the skills I have learned in this class like performing a close reading of a text and interpreting authorial choices. This is the first major digital project I have worked on, aside from originally creating my eportfolio and then updating it this summer. I have learned a lot about creating on a digital platform and all of the skills I have gained from this experience will be extremely useful in an increasingly digital world!

For the edition itself, I decided to stick with minimal colors (a scheme of black, white, and red) not out of a lack of creativity, but out of respect for a serious topic. In my opinion, having something that was super flashy or colorful wouldn’t have made sense. In an attempt to make the digital edition more user-friendly, I embedded links to my annotations within the primary text selections and I am really happy with how seamless the transition is from the text to the individual annotations. I am also really glad that I decided to create a separate site for my digital edition as it gave me more room to work.

I chose to frame Danquah’s work in the context of a patient narrative so that I could highlight the theme of racism within the medical field, focusing on her experience with a medical condition. I also felt that it was important to highlight the fact that Danquah faced triple oppression, not just as someone with depression, but as a black woman with depression. All of these parts of her identity shape the experience she had battling with depression, so I think that they are important to acknowledge.