September 26 2017

Kathaleen McDonald

Dr. Wielgos

Senior Seminar

26 September 2017

Response Eight/Blog One: What’s Digital Humanities Anyway?

            I found Thomas Rommel’s “Literary Studies” and Matthew Kirschenbaum’s “What is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” the most enlightening of the three articles. I found what they had to say directly applies to my future career, so I found some quotes and ideas from each article I found to be the most relevant.

            Rommel’s “Literary Studies” concerned including computers and other technologies in English studies. Rommel says “computer-based literary studies need to clarify that the computer is a tool used for a specific result in the initial phases of literary analysis. No final result, let alone an ‘interpretation’ of a text, can be obtained by computing power alone; human interpretation is indispensable to arrive at meaningful results.” I like this quote a lot, because Rommel explains that the computer is simply a tool, without the human mind, it cannot do anything. Although literary studies may change in the way it is written and seen, it still needs the human mind to be interpreted and appreciated.

            Kirschenbaum’s “What is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” raised a good point about Twitter. Twitter isn’t just a social media platform anymore: it’s also a way for teachers to connect to other teachers and share resources. Kirschenbaum ends his article by saying:

The digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that are bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally accustomed to, a scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend on networks of people and live an active 24/7 life online.

More and more, we are using technology to connect to each other, especially in the classroom. So many of my classes use Blackboard as a means of communicating among professor and students, and there are many instances where classes will be held online. With the humanities becoming more digital, we are able to connect our interpretations and writings about certain texts in so many more ways than ever before. We can create blogs, share posts on Facebook and Twitter, and publish our articles easily so that our writing is more accessible than ever before. The digital humanities are becoming more and more relevant, and should be something that we shouldn’t ignore, since “In the space of a little more than five years digital humanities had gone from being a term of convenience used by a group of researchers who had already been working together for years to something like a movement” and “the digital humanities seem like the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time.” Digital humanities is growing, and it is becoming a central role in the classroom.

            Even though digital humanities is becoming more and more relevant and a part of academia and the classroom setting, it is important to remember that there is no better “computer” than the human mind. Without it, there would be no computers, and no reason to write.