DHM 280

My first experience with digital humanities (DH) has been a bit confusing, but I’m slowly starting to grasp the concept. I’ll admit, I signed up for this course simply for the general education credit, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t interested in what DH was.

As we discussed DH this week, I remembered an experience that could possibly fall under the broad umbrella of digital humanities. I was part of a History Honor Society, and we had to gain a certain amount of points to continue to stay in the society. One opportunity was to transcribe articles for an online library. It was interesting to see the articles and letters from history, and I knew I was doing something great for those who struggled to read the articles.

During class on Monday, I was a bit worried by how broad DH is. Since there was no “exact” definition for DH, I couldn’t help but feel nervous. However, as we began breaking down the definition of “digital” and “humanities”, I began feeling a little more confident. I can’t guarantee I immediately knew everything about DH, but I was able to understand it a bit better.

I was also excited to hear we would be exploring the Special Collections at the library. I’ve been meaning to go up there and explore the area a bit, yet I haven’t found the time to go yet. This class will be a great opportunity to explore the Special Collections, and hopefully learn new things!

One idea that helped me the most this week was Miriam Posner’s three simple steps to describe DH: “Sources, Process, and Presented.” I thoroughly enjoyed watching her video, and it was interesting to hear from creators of their own DH projects. After watching her video, I can definitely say I understood DH the most I had all week.

Although I understood the three simple steps of DH, I am struggling to explore it further. When we searched a website for clues on how they found their sources, how they processed, and presented their information, I was feeling lost. I know this is a skill I will learn overtime, but I was a bit frustrated that I couldn’t understand it immediately. I assume I’ll also have to learn to be patient with myself and DH as the semester progresses.

Overall, this week was a busy but interesting one! I’m excited to see how I will progress this semester in Digital Humanities! 🙂

In the first week of this digital humanities, we talked heavily about what digital humanities actually is. The problem with this is that the definition of this discipline ranges depending on who you ask. The main point of confusion is what exactly “humanities” is. if you were ask a philosopher and a historian, their definitions are going to be of two extremes. However, I noticed how similar this term is to culture. In my pop culture class, we discussed how the word culture is one of the most difficult to define words in the english language. Although this may be a bit exaggerated, it cannot be ignored that the definition of culture has changed drastically in the past millennia. Like humanities, the definition varies depending who you ask while also retaining the definitions that came before our present day definition. I found this to be interesting because I’d say that the study of culture counts as a humanity, and the definition of humanity is equally as difficult to understand. However, digital humanities contrasts with the idea of culture because digital humanities, unlike the other disciplines that fall under humanities, has everything to do with logging information into computers and making it available digitally. While internet culture exists, things such as tradition or customs, which vary based on the region, are harder to process as there are other factors to consider such as history, spirituality, and morality. All of these things factor into culture and that is something technology, which works in absolutes and does to consider these factors, does not consider and cannot be processed. Sure there are some overlap between the the two ideas and you could consider culture a part of digital humanities, there are significant differences in the two concepts. It’s likely that culture and digital humanities will never have a solid definition and continue to evolve as the years progress.

Hi my name is Riley Whitenite. The first week of Digital Humanities we have covered the material that is expected to cover during this semester and the educational goals that we strive to reach by the end of this course. Particularly, I found it interesting when the librarian came in and had a copy of a student’s book of all her memories from West Chester University from many years ago. As he was showing us all of the pages, I found myself visualizing how to turn the pages into a website, which is what we will be doing throughout the year. It was very interesting to think about how the woman’s book that we were showed, was basically a hard copy of a social media account. Everything she added into her scrapbook was memories that would now be posted to Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook etc. When we were asked to describe what we think Digital Humanities is, my definition was very broad, as I honestly did not know much on the topic at all. Having the website, created by Jason Heppler, that regenerates thousands of different definitions on Digital Humanities allowed me to gain a better understanding on what this class will typically be about. Personally, my favorite quote that I found was, “Rather broadly: humanities teaching and research that makes use of computers and even more importantly internet applications as an integral component of either the teaching or the research.”- Larry Swain. I liked this quote in particular because it broke down the meaning in a short definition, in which the wording was easier for me to fully understand. In the reading, “The Expanded Field”, which talked about the maturing of Digital Humanities over the years. By the end of the week we talked about how to break down a project into its smaller components and have a better understanding of how it was really built. The techniques talked about in the video “How did They Make That” closely evaluates a project and how other students or peers have completed a project. 

Throughout class this week I found out Intro to Digital humanities is. The class went on the website and found many different definition to what the basic definitions of what Digital humanities is. I can relate this part of class by being a marketing major. Throughout marketing has a wide variety so it was nice seeing digital humanities has lots of different topics and deftions. It also taught that it can help me by collaborating in the future with different clients such as digitization projects and overall sharing my finding of with people. This will overall help me have a deeper connection with my clients. We also learned about mapping which shows history of how well we tell storys about the past.Which can help me get my facts straight throughout my work life in the future. Larger implications of something we learned in class was text analysis and how important it is. Text analysis helps you research methods and describe the text. I would put it as helping you comprehend overall the story better. A question I have was at the beginning of class what is it? What is Digital Humanities? little did i know that it has so many different defitions. The simple defiton that helps me know what it is a field of research teaching and methods to help discipline of the humanities. Overall making sure your facts are straight and going deeper into the text. I would compare this class to my Econ class i am taking. We have to learn what our economy has been through. We have to do graphing (which looks like the maps) and see how much prices go up but to be correct we could use digital humanities to help us research. Though its similar to this class it is different from my other classes. I learn many different things and i would say writing class could be used with digital humanities for research but i feel that the whole topic is different and that we are more focused on how we write then the research itself. You could relate this class to pop culture by speaking about the election that is happening. People need to know the facts on who they are going to vote for and using Digital Humanites could help. Finding more information on them, Seeing if the website is out of date, and overall helps who you are gonna vote for. These are the reason why digital humanites is important and relates to your life in many ways.