The semester flew by. At the start of the semester, I didn’t even know that digital humanities existed. I just took this class because it was a 300-level humanities class.

Digital humanities is looking at humanities through a digital lens, where methods such as textual or network analysis are used. Dr.Kirschenbaum views digital humanities as “common methodological outlook,” or a way of using modern methods to examine and question problems. Additionally, I learned about the other half of the class, “research methods.” Research starts with a topic, then a question is sparked from that topic, then the topic/question is researched and hopefully answered with some significance and possibly application. After research an argument is made, which can be broken into a claim, reason, evidence, alternative, and warrant. A claim is an opinion, which is supported with various reasons, which is further supported with evidence. Also, there might be reasons which conflict with the claim and warrants which connect points that don’t seem obvious.

My preconceived notion of digital humanities was that it was just an odd humanities field that would only be used in the world of academia. But as the semester went on I started to notice in some of the media I consume. An example would be a post on the Detroit Pistons’ subreddit. The topic wasn’t a standard humanities topic but that it part digital humanities but it does still fit a digital humanities project. The topic was Andre Drummond and his skill, the question was if Drummond is elite. The significance was to unify the subreddit into believing that Drummond is elite indeed.

The author’s claim was that Drummond was elite. The reasons weren’t put in a traditional sense but more of disproving a false belief about Drummond and then proving it with evidence. The evidence that was used was advanced basketball statistics, videos, pictures, and evidence from recent games. The author even included arguments from respected basketball reporters/analysists such as Zach Lowe. But Drummond wasn’t just praised, alternatives were given, where it was explained that some of the arguments against Drummond were valid such as his poor free throw percentage. The author even uses warrants, such as explaining why rebounding percent is a better statistic than rebounds per game. Finally, the post was put on a social media site and blog, where it still is open and public for everyone to see.

The last part of digital humanities that I will discuss is the part which I learned the most from, that failure is part of the process. In both final projects, I picked, there wasn’t a lot of success. In the first project, image analysis was used on splatter art. Originally, I attempted in MATLAB which I had to relearn than I moved to Python which was a struggle just to run. From the code that I did manage to run the results were all over the place. The second project was to do an analysis of speaking times for Bond villains and henchman. The results were all over the place again, but this time I am working on finding reasons for the discrepancies in speaking time. Not all projects work out but failure is part of being digital humanist.

References:

Sinke, Joe. “Yes. Andre Drummond Is Elite. (Post Is Long, Bring Snacks.).” JoeTruck’s Thoughts. N.p., 23 Nov. 2016. Web. 05 Dec. 2016.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. 2012. “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” In Debates in the Digital Humanities. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/38.