“[T]he Digital Humanities has greatly expanded the potential power and reach of the humanities disciplines, both within the academy, and, just as importantly, outside its walls.”
Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 3.
Why did this particular passage grab your attention?
One of the most important parts of the acquisition and expression of knowledge is that it be accessible to others, even those without formal training in a given field. At least in the laboratory sciences there is the assumption that actual researchers will produce literature for other academics while designated “science communicators” will relay the most important of this information to the masses through means such as news programming or pop science journalism, so to see accessibility emphasized so strongly as a foundation of a field rather than an afterthought was quite surprising to me.
What elements of your past experiences, current interests, or future plans did it kindle?
As a biology major I have had to read many, many research articles and am always struck at how dense and aloof the writing is. Even professors confess to having to read through a given article multiple times to fully absorb its contents, so someone with no STEM experience would be hopelessly lost trying to interpret the vast majority of work done in some of the most influential fields of work today.
My own personal frustration with this type of writing has given me a strong desire to make my future work available and understandable to anyone interested in it, especially those outside of academia. The fact that many academics are trying to emphasize this type of accessibility in the humanities gives me some reassurance that a similar mindset can be achieved in the sciences as well.
Under the large umbrella of Digital (Arts &) Humanities, which areas of inquiry, methods or techniques are you most eager to pursue this term and why?
I am very eager to learn about the use of visual representation tools like 3D modelling and web design to distribute one’s work. I am also interested in learning more about the techniques used by DAH academics to help those outside their fields find and understand their work, especially projects that might be considered more dense or difficult to engage with than a simpler project such as the http://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/ website.
3 thoughts on “Reflective blog post #1”
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I shared the same frustration, especially in my high school calculus classes. I found it difficult to understand my teacher’s demonstrations for derivatives using 3D curved surfaces. The problem here was that he drew all the curves on a board, often spending a lot of time trying to explain them to students. When I took my first calculus class at Carleton, I was surprised that the way we learned about derivatives was accompanied by a visual representation with curves, using Mac’s Graphing Calculator. The software generated models of differential equations; I usually played around with these models by editing their equations to see the behavior of the curve. I think Digital Humanities is already making learning in some classrooms really enjoyable, although it still has a long way to go.
I understand your STEM critiques entirely. As a psych major, I am in a weird limbo where I am more STEM than the humanities but more humanities-based than a field like neuroscience. However, something that brought hope to me in digital humanities is the idea that there is room for everybody, as interdisciplinary collaboration allows for broader accessibility of information and tools. Seems like we share the same reassurance!
I share the same frustration when it comes to academic writing. Reading a math paper, or a CS book is hard, and sometimes I have to read a passage multiple times to fully comprehend it. I also believe that authors should strive to make their texts more easy to understand. However, I am not sure complex articles can ever be written for people outside the fields, as they depend on niche knowledge/concepts. How complex do you think the subject of an article can be so it is still understandable by an average person?