“
Digital humanists have much to learn from communication and media design about how to juxtapose and integrate words and images, create hierarchies of reading, forge pathways of understanding, deploy grids and templates to best effect, and develop navigational schemata that guide and produce meaningful interactions.
Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 13.
What grabbed my attention the most about this quote was how digital humanists are described as having much to learn across several different platforms for how and why they develop their media. There are several different platforms a digital humanist can learn and many of them are accessible through one’s laptop. The quote put into perspective just how many different medias and platforms there are to choose from which makes it up to the digital humanist to choose and learn the platform that is most useful for what they’re building. This made me realize how important it is that a digital humanist needs to know their why and how for what they’re building because what they create will have implications for the future. Additionally, digital humanists are always learning as tech is evolving. The powerfulness of digital humanists learning and creating was emphasized when I noticed the phrases “create hierarchies” and “forge pathways.” The use of words like “hierarchies” and “forge” show how potent creating a digital humanities project can be. Before taking this class, I wondered what type of meaning the projects we created would have and now I know that what a digital humanist creates can have meaningful interactions for themselves and others who view their work. Under the large umbrella of Digital (Arts&) Humanities, I am most excited to pursue data management, data visualization, and data analysis. I feel I have always been interested in how data is stored, collected, and analyzed. Throughout last year and this summer I worked as a data analyst for my basketball team at Carleton. I learned that there are a multitude of ways one can visualize and collect data. I also realized that not all datasets are created equal. I’m excited to see if any of my work will be similar to the work we do for this class!
1 thought on “Week 1 Reflective Blog Post (Jasmine Maldonado)”
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
It is interesting that you highlighted the ever-changing, recent nature of digital humanities because this is very important to understand when analyzing the digital humanities. We saw in class that there are so many different definitions of digital humanities that encompass a wide scope of different activities. This just goes to show how new the concept is. I think going into this class it’s important to understand that even professional digital humanists are constantly learning and exploring new tools and so it’s okay to struggle with these tools. This point also highlights the importance of researching new digital humanities tools and concepts in order to keep up with the ever-changing field.