Reflection Post 1:

Xingyi Zhang
Sat, 17 Sep 2022 00:39:07 +0000
Week 1, bias, reflection, What is Digital Humanties

How might the history of ancient scroll design and late medieval page layouts reshape our imaginings of the expressive possibilities of digital scrolling or digital page units? Can computational and digital environments be designed to capture the fluidity of an intercultural dialogue between diasporic peoples?
Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 9.

Despite my experience as digital humanities associate at Carleton for a year, the huge variability of the projects I am involved in makes the concept of digital humanities still ambiguous to me. How could textual analysis of Victorian novels and creating digital models of 3D archeological collections fall into the same discipline?

Chapter one of Digital Humanities by Burdick et al. gives a great summary of the history of Digital humanities and brings me a new perspective: digital humanities is about freedom and possibilities. It might be hard to define what the discipline does, and some scholars even try not to do so. With numerous technologies and methodologies, countless great projects on various topics are made possible. The book also raises many debates about the discipline, such as the validity of methods or inclusivity of the field. I think those debates are great and make the atmosphere of the discipline more appealing to me. Through communication and collaboration with people of diverse backgrounds, different ideas can then be celebrated and make the field better.

Besides the immense potential mentioned above, I am also interested in the limitation of digital humanities. When the book mentions the validity of design, it reminds me of the research I did the past summer. I investigate the perceptual bias created by font length and color in word clouds, which is a very common tool for text visualization. It is shown that some psychological biases will cause people to perceive the information differently than the designer intended. How could we reduce that bias through a more suitable design? There are questions to be answered from a psychological perspective.

More generally, when we apply different methods and introduce new technologies, do we lose something in the process? No matter if it is curation, analysis, or editing, there are decisions to be made. Which sample and model is a better option? How to interpret the results and form an argument? How to select and organize the material? Biases are inevitably involved when making decisions on those questions. I hope to investigate more about the questions of bias this term. Only by continuously questioning the constraints and reflecting on problems, we could recognize and minimize the personal, cultural, social, and technological biases in Digital Humanities.