WEEK 2: What is done in Digital Humanities

November 24, 2021 / 2 Comments

Week two has two different readings and they are “What we think we will build and what we really build” and “Please Write it Down: Design and Research in Digital Humanities”.

The reading from week 2 on “What we think we will build and what we really build” has opened my eyes to what digital humanities is doing and what we are truly building. It is said by McGann’s that if a digital humanities project was created as it was specified it might not be a digital humanities work because digital humanities projects are meant to be reflected on and it can even make a project even better if you have companions working on the project with you and bouncing ideas between each other.

Digital archives are meant to be assessed by the widest audience possible and some contents in it can change, be adjusted and new information can be inputted, but for some topic areas in digital humanities does not confront the problems that are meant to be addressed. With digital humanities being a way of turning humanities into a digital form you will believe that it will have a clear-cut plan on how to fully address a topic but as stated in “What we think we will build and what we really build” this is not entirely the case. Some topics tend to go out of control and have many archives that happen to stray away from the main topic that it is talking about. Now, this can be seen not only in Digital Humanities but also in other fields where a topic has to be written and explained upon.

As said earlier digital humanities are meant to be in collaboration with several people. From the reading on “What we think we will build and what we really build” digital humanities work with librarians, programmers, and colleagues in other disciplines. Digital Humanities projects are to be worked on by teams and this is because different people working on the project can bounce off ideas to make the project even better and I believe it can even make a project more fun to work on.

“Please Write it Down: Design and Research in Digital Humanities” talk about how digital humanist needs to write what they discover when working on a project and what they learned as a result of reflecting on that project. I believe this to be very true to not only digital humanists but to everyone in whatever field of work they are involved in. It is a very important thing to reflect on what you had done and the process you went through to get to the end product of your project or whatever you could be doing. Furthermore, it can also be a very good way of knowing what can be done to make the process of working on a project easier but also to know how a project can be enhanced in any way.

These two readings have shown me that Digital Humanities has a lot more to it than I originally thought.