Introduction to Digital Humanities!

Starting off, when I first signed up for this class, I had no idea what I was in for. All I needed was to take a humanities course, and this one really fit my schedule so I chose it. I didn’t really read much about it nor did I bother to look up what digital humanities even was. I never heard the two words even put together. All I had saw was that the class name had “Research Methods”, so I figured we’d be doing a lot of researching in the class and learning the best ways in order to do research. Because I’m sure that almost everyone has been just googling their topic and just clicking on the first link that has the most information on it. No one would ever really care to check if it was credible or not, but right now, that’s probably the most important thing to do. Checking to see if your source that you’re using can even be trusted is the first thing you should do. Anyway, back to digital humanities. So the first thing I heard about digital humanities from others is that it has to do with computing and humanities. Sounds simple? No. Interesting? In a way! However, after this class is over, hopefully I will be understanding the world in a whole different perspective. Digital Humanities can’t even be explained that easily. Research has gotten a lot more different than it was in the past. Now that history and other information can be accessed over the web, it’s definitely easier to get to and always available. Computations and data are the main focus in digital humanities, and being able to understand data is significant. What’s more important is how you came to know certain information rather than what you actually know. The organization of the data is important as well since a lot of the time it’s not organized and one really has to understand it to get it right, based on the fact that the data can really be manipulated to get to another purpose. Another thing is that technology has turned into who we are, in other words. It has been combining with our actual lives. Technology has become us. Everything is just getting easier and easier with technology, and we depend more on it than ever before. With digital humanities, we can learn to understand what is going on and why technology has taken such a big toll on us than before.