Welcome All,

My name is Thomas Glavan, I have two thumbs and no idea what I am doing.

My hopes are to remedy this by the end of the semester. By no means do I expect to be a master of digital humanities or research at the end of this endeavor but any amount of noticeable progress is good enough for me. Below I have set up a few learning goals I have for my blog and this class as a whole this semester.

Firstly, I want to advance my knowledge of the digital humanities and hopefully through my own learning process I can show you a new perspective to approach research with and not bore any of my readers to death. As a mechanical engineer the “Help Me Solve My Practical Problem” (Booth, Colomb, and Williams 22) method of research most interests me. I am a very straight forward “give me just whats important” kind of guy and this method seems to best fit that mentality.

A method of research is not much without a subject of interest to apply it to. Continuing to use my major as the leading reason, the topic in digital humanities that I would most like to research is how mass data sharing and global communication has impacted the advancement of the average person’s ability to have any piece of desired info available at a moments notice. In addition to this I would like to figure out why we so commonly misuse this gift to look up memes and cat videos.

Last but certainly not least, as a person who has far to often described himself as “technologically illiterate”, I want to advance all of my digital literacy with a specific focus on communication through digital media. As a secondary objective my ability effectively interface with machines has always been sub-par and although I did not register for this class with the intent of fixing this flaw, the blogging portion of this class may serve as a good learning experience.

Hopefully you are not already in a state of slack-jawed boredom drooling in the dim glow of an electronic device from that but I bring relief in that this ends my first blog post for the semester.

References:

Booth, Wayne C.; Colomb, Gregory G.; Williams, Joseph M.; “The Craft of Research”; 3rd Edition; The University of Chicago Press, (C) 2008