Blog Post 1- Jacob Ventura

Though this work was varied in nature, there were common, salient features: a concern with textual analysis and cataloging, the study of linguistic features, an emphasis on pedagogical supports and learning environments, and research questions driven by analyzing structured data.

Burdick et al. “One: Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 1-26.

This passage grabbed my attention because it encompasses the main components of digital humanities. Most of these are topics that we will go over throughout the course. Although technology has evolved immensely since the beginning of digital humanities, the main focus remains the same. I was surprised about the early roots of digital humanities. I would’ve thought that it only emerged in lieu of the internet and computers, but that is not true. It dates back to the 1940s with networks and computation pioneering work. I imagine that analyzing texts and numbers would’ve been a lot more difficult without the advancement in technology that we have today, and I wonder what the process was like. Later on, even still before the internet, digital humanities became focused on archival projects… which is the project we are doing for this course! The quote covers one of my current interests in analyzing structured data. I am fascinated by data and love exploring it to come to conclusions and answer different questions. I plan on using the data management and analysis skills in future statistics classes as well as in my career. I am not exactly sure what textual analysis means in this sense, but I have analyzed texts in numerous English classes throughout high school and college. However, we did not use technology. So, I am eager to use digital humanities tools to enhance the analysis. These skills can be used in future classes and jobs in which I need to analyze texts. This term, I am most excited to dive into the data analysis and visualization aspects of the course. I have experience analyzing data in different classes and projects but have limited practice with visualization tools. I am planning on majoring in statistics, so this course gives me an introduction to the tools I will be using in the future in classes and jobs.