“Why are you here [at college]? If not to discover new ways of looking at the world?” – Milo Yiannopoulos

“What is Digital Humanities?” – Everyone at Research Methods

During the beginning of the semester, this question was surprisingly difficult to answer, but if this was reiterated to me now, I would simply say, “It is a unique application of humanities that is fueled by technological methods created through scholarly collaboration.” In simpler terms, Digital Humanities is a branch of humanities that utilizes technical skills through collaborative research.

Collaboration and technical orientation! In my opinion, these are two of the most important qualities I developed in Digital Humanities. From peer reviewing blog posts to the final project, I honed my technical skills with my classmates. On a regular basis, the class used a variety of Digital Humanities tools to supplement our learning. I was well acquainted with the use of online tools such as GitHub, iMovie, and text analysis softwares. On a narrower note, topics such as social networks and gender analysis demanded the use of applications such as, gender timer, google sheets, and text analysis, to analyze various types of media across all platforms. Moreover, participation is a large part of the learning experience in Digital Humanities, something I wish I did more of in the class.

Digital Humanities is heavily based on the ideas formulated by the class, but unfortunately, I’m an introvert when it comes to participating. This class is unlike any research class, as I felt that we did more collaborative class work than the actual researching of research methods. Although, there were plenty of absent class participation in Digital Humanities, and despite the rarity of lively class discussions, I still enjoyed learning from them. Cultural competencies such as collective intelligence and play, are attributes that are well under my belt. Moreover, frequent class collaboration was a completely new thing for me in a humanities class, an interesting change of class dynamic.

Collaboration is key in Digital Humanities, it is what drives class discussions and what brings different perspectives of analysis together to form new ideas. Peer reviewing blog posts, for example, is a way for writers to learn new ways of looking at their own work based on critique. I’ve greatly benefitted from this as I have often adjusted my writing style to appropriately address our weekly topics. Aside from that, the final project was an excellent learning experience as well, as Matt and I had the opportunity to utilize our technical engineering skills in Digital Humanities.

My experience on working through the final project was the most interesting work I’ve ever done in Digital Humanities. Our project was on the textual analysis of past versus present science fiction books. Despite several disadvantages, Matt and I were able to effectively convey our argument using the visual representations we’ve gathered using the digital method, text analysis. Cultural competencies such as play and performance were the biggest developments in this project, as we were able to adapt to our disadvantages and discover new ways of problem solving. Matt and I successfully managed our digital humanities project from end-to-end and learned a lot about the comparative study we conducted on science fiction books and acquainted ourselves with the use of text analysis software, such as KH Coder. Along with that, we also produced an excellent write-up of our project based on project argument feedback and blog-writing experience.

In conclusion, I developed a lot of my intangible qualities in this class. For me, Inner qualities such as, communication, flexibility, adaptability, reliability, and willingness to collaborate, were the most important developments I had in Digital Humanities. Along with that, the technical skills and Digital Humanities tools learned was a great addition to my engineering knowledge and skills. In the near future, I plan to use these developments to improve my image and credibility as an engineering student so that I will be better prepared for the inevitable challenges in life.

Thank you for reading!