Something in the making…

My digital humanities project involves the field of education, specifically literature. So often I have heard of classes interacting via Skype and Facetime, which sounds like such a great opportunity for my students; however, the wifi in our school would be more of a hindrance than a help. I can just imagine FaceTime timing out, the wifi shutting down mid-Skype session, and my projector failing me. (If you can’t tell, technology is the enemy in our school district, unfortunately). One idea that I always wanted to do was to talk to other classrooms in other school districts about the class novels we are reading. However, our school day starts earlier than most other school districts, and our class schedules would most likely not match up with the others. This predicament lead me to my digital humanities project. Continue Reading!

DH…It’s Going to be Okay…

I had a bit of an “Ah Ha” moment while I read Dave Parry’s “The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism” essay. In this section of the text, various authors discuss the future of DH and their interpretation of DH. Parry, however, captures and, in my opinion, eloquently defines Digital Humanities (even though he claims it is impossible to do so). He starts his essay by describing the lack of control scholars have over DH and how it is defined. Though, after reading the rest of the text, DH and the possibilities of DH have never been clearer to me. Parry argues that there isn’t a foundational project that exists that other DH projects can be based upon. However, I believe Parry captures the foundation when he says, “digital humanities is largely, or primarily, about using computing technologies as tools to do traditional humanities-based research.” Now, he makes it clear that what constitutes “research” is open-ended and SHOULD expand from texts to social media and beyond.
Keep on reading . . .

The Many Tales of DH

In this week’s readings, the focus is on practicing the Digital Humanities and DH’s role in academia. I found these readings to be thought-provoking and interesting. Overall, I believed I ended the readings with a comprehensive understanding of how DH factors into the university realm today. What I thought was most interesting and what I ended thinking about was the fact that the moment I stopped reading the text, there was probably some change or evolution occurring in DH at that very same moment. It’s a fascinating concept to me, since my English education at the collegiate level was so canonized and traditional. DH is constantly adjusting to its role at the university level, and though the authors did an excellent job of conveying their own interpretation of DH’s role, I couldn’t help but think that there are thousands of other ways that DH affects a university. This chapter was just a small, savory taste. Keep on Reading!