Introduction to Digital Humanities | ENGL 668K at the University of Maryland I wanted to write a last post about some ideas I had and things that happened to me during the course. I wanted to share them with you and I thought that this was the best place to do that. I enrolled in this course because of the reasons we were and are studying, especially in this last section. I was curious about DH because I like to build and transform things inside the field of literary studies. I never liked the way I studied at the academia, at least in Latin American literature (I do not think English is very different). When I began studying here, I realized that it wasn’t that different and that professors still were reading Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, (Rancière as a relatively new member of the circle) which I find all very interesting but I am really tired of listening always to the same approach to literature. When I went with this these ideas to my Spanish and Portuguese department, I thought the reaction would be worst. Books were a sign of power.
MIT Technology Review Graphic Sociology » Seeing Social Data Cairo, Alberto. (2013) The Functional Art: An introduction to information graphics and visualization. Berkeley: New Riders, a division of Pearson. Overview A functional art is a book in divided into four parts, but really it is easier to understand as only two parts. The second part of the book is a series of interviews with journalists, designers, and artists about graphics and the work required to make good ones. The second is a set of photographs taken of a clay model by Juan Velasco and Fernando Baptista of National Geographic that was used to recreate an ancient dwelling place call Gobekli Tepe that was in what is now Turkey. As a sociologist I am accustomed to reading interviews and am fascinated by the convergence and divergence in the opinions represented. There is a fifth part to the book, too, a DVD of Cairo presenting the material covered in the first three chapters of the book. What does this book do well? Diversity What doesn’t this book do well? Summary References
Datafication: How the Lens of Data Changes How We See Ourselves Digital media allow us to produce, collect, organise and interpret more data about our lives than ever before. Our every digital interaction contributes to vast databases of information that index our behaviour from online movie choices to mapping networks of connections across Twitter. In an age of uncertainty, big data sets promise to provide an objective lens through which to understand the world, and both individuals and institutions like schools are turning to data to drive analysis and action. But what does this increasing datafication mean for how we understand the world, and how we understand learning? Learning to Read Digital Data Data can be reassuring. But our interpretation of data is also skewed by how that data is represented. Data Reflects the Past and Drives Future Behaviour As we engage in online activity, we leave trails of data in our wake that are added to the huge databases held by Facebook, Google and marketing companies. Remixing Data
Digital Humanities Now Digital Scholarship in the Humanities | Exploring the digital humanities