Category: Uncategorized

During this week, I was able to further solidify my understanding of what digital humanities are. We had spoken about different definitions in the past, but we hadn’t worked firsthand with any projects, so the term was still a bit ambiguous to me. Now that we have explored certain projects in a deeper way, I can wrap my head around the concept digital humanities.

Meriam Posner’s sources, processed, presented method is useful for me when I navigated the various DH projects we explored this week. While it is not an exhaustive method, it does help me get started with analyzing each project. What was especially interesting to me were the DH projects that required the processing of very old manuscripts and letters. Being able to see the original handwriting of certain important people throughout history and also having the readable text side-by-side is very useful to me as a reader, and also reinforces the human side of the digital processes.

The most interesting website we have visited, in my opinion, is “Readers Mapped”. I am a frequent user of Goodreads, I was very curious to see the data visualized from a website I use often. I could definitely relate to the concept of staying near related genres, especially in reading literature and listening to music. For example, I am a classical musician, and some of my favorite pieces of music are (naturally) classical. I frequently listen to composers like Mozart, Bach, Ravel, Mahler, and Scriabin. You could expect a music listener like me to also listen to jazz, since many jazz musicians were heavily inspired by the great classical composers (Bill Evans was specifically heavily inspired by Ravel). On the other hand, a music listener like myself would be much less likely to listen to modern pop music (Taylor Swift, Sombr, Sabrina Carpenter, Noah Kahan, etc.). This phenomenon is paralleled in the graph on the website “Readers Mapped.” People who are avid romance readers read very little literary fiction, but there is some overlap between the romance readers and the fantasy readers. (This is expected, especially with the huge popularity of the subgenre “romantasy.”)

As for one last thing I found interesting, the graph on “Readers Mapped” looks eerily similar to the human brain (see below).

This week we talked a lot about different archives, old books and stories, and how old files have been digitized and organized so anyone interested can easily access and sort through different files that they wouldn’t be able to do in the physical world. I think it’s super important for old history and stories to be preserved, and having them digital means they’ll be there forever. This makes learning about the past a lot easier. Instead of having to travel somewhere and look through a bunch of physical books or documents, people can find a lot of this information online. This can also help students and researchers find things that they wouldn’t have found otherwise. It makes information more available to everyone instead of only people with access. Having such an easy access source to these types of things gives people a broader understanding of the world and how the people before us shaped how the world is today. 2000 years ago all people had rock paintings. It just goes to show how far the digital world has come.

One thing I can connect this to is social media, especially TikTok. There are millions of videos being posted every day showing what people are doing, what’s popular, and what’s happening in the world. In a way, social media is creating an archive of our generation without us really thinking about it. Years from now, people can look back at old videos the same way in class we’ve been looking back on old files.

In the project https://railroads.unl.edu it uses a variety of sources including, historical maps, newspapers, photograph, letters and railroad records. By this organizing and collecting these materials so that users can explore and connect railroads with modern America. I liked the presentation because it combines traditional historical sources with interactive maps and visualizations.