tl;dr; Digital humanities made my head hurt at first, but then it knocked my socks off.

I spent a lot of time in the early days HUM 380 feeling confused. It took me a long time to grasp the concept of what digital humanities is. As I expressed in my older post “What the HECK is Digital Humanities,” I did not find any answers in the initial readings or in the textbook definition of digital humanities. It was not until I was instructed to complete my own digital humanities research, that I truly began to understand digital humanities. All of the readings and the in-class assignments soon began to make sense. For those who may have missed it in my “Final Project Post,” the final project I have chosen is taking all of the Star Wars movie scripts and using text analysis to observe changes in racial representation throughout the films’ many years. I am doing this by building a program to run the scripts through, in order to get a word count for each character, and to compare the words spoken by characters of color vs white characters. This project has not only been incredibly fun, but also very eye opening. I quickly began to see how digital humanities researchers can take traditional humanities research and automate it using a program to analyze text, or explore trends using social media and APIs, or to even measure humanity against artificial intelligence by attempting construct a “creative” algorithm. Digital humanities research can take a relatively thoughtless television show and turn it into a think piece using just a timer and a pen. It can dive into our wildest questions and theories about humanity by using logic and technology to break familiar information down into digestible bits of new data to consider and reconsider.

Through this class, I have been able to apply many of the skills I learned in my programming classes and use them to perform a new, exciting, and more importantly, useful, research. Being able to take the information out of one classroom and directly apply it to another has given me the opportunity to fall more in love with my major, as well as given me life applicable skills that I will continue to use, whether I realize it or not, for the rest of my life. Through my frustrations, I have gained respect for the accomplished digital humanities researchers whose readings I struggled to understand before; and through my success I feel even more connected to them. The skills and experiences I have gained from this class are something I truly appreciate, and I appreciate Professor Hemphill for providing me the opportunity to gain them. This is a class that has been a valuable part of my IIT career, and one that I’ve already begun to recommend to my peers. It is not every semester that I get to walk into a class with no knowledge of a topic, and walk out as a certified researcher.

Sources

https://libbyh.github.io/methods-f16/What-in-the-HECK-is-Digital-Humanities/

https://libbyh.github.io/methods-f16/Rachael-Final-DH-Project/