Reflective Blog Post #1

I was particularly interested in this quote because of its definition of what Digital Humanities is. Before taking the Hacking Humanities class I had only heard of the term Digital Humanities briefly, but I did not know exactly what it was. I had the general sense that Digital Humanities improved on humanities in some areas by introducing the use of digital resources, and when I think of an improvement of something I think of it as being a replacement for the original but from this quote I see that, while Digital Humanities does improve on some aspects of humanities, it can’t replace humanities. 

Having been immersed in education with a strong emphasis on humanities and my decision to major in computer science I was deeply interested in how these two, seemingly unrelated, topics could be combined. I believe that Digital Humanities will allow me to see these two areas in a different perspective and could potentially allow me to open up to new ideas within these fields. I think that Digital Humanities would also be very beneficial in my future with its ability to perform as a humanities but with greater flexibility. 

I am excited to learn more about how digital humanities can be used with fields of technology specifically in data visualization and network analysis. I am interested in data visualization because I think that the idea of Digital Humanities being able to use technology to explore areas like literature, music and others, and then being able to produce a visual representation, like in the lab about the popular food searches, could be very useful. I would also like to learn more about network analysis because it works by analyzing groups of objects or people and then depicting the relationships between them. I think that network analysis and digital humanities are both somewhat similar and I would like to learn more about both of these topics.