This week during our digital humanities course we learned a lot. I feel as though we were taught a better understanding of what digital humanities is and the different parts of it. In class we were shown the complete letters of Willa Cather. On the website we were able to see a whole range of things. We could search for a specific letter that was sent by using all these different features and filters such as date ranges, annotations, letter ID, etc. Date ranges are very useful when scholars and writers are interested in Cather’s life history and how she develops as a person as well as an author. They can use this to find information like what she did towards the beginning and end of her life, important dates, where she lives, and change in status. In class we learned that this allows us to do a date based search for someone’s life. We also talked and actively went through the annotations that were available for the letters. Annotations can include other writers’ thoughts and ideas. Therefore, depending on the kind of research we are doing, we might be interested when Cather was using literal language. For example, we searched “red cloud” in the search box and included annotations, which allowed us to find something we never knew about. After doing this activity for a little while, I realized it all comes down to what kind of research question we are asking and what we are looking for (either literal language or just topics). Throughout this week we also talked more about metadata and defined what that is. Metadata is information about another piece of information. For example, letters are a piece of information because it includes texts, words, and meaning. If we have information about that specific letter, then it is considered metadata.
