Digital humanities use information technologies and tools to communicate a variety of sources and provide academic arguments that show the connections between a society’s history, culture and literature.

One of the key characteristics of these projects is the translation of primary and secondary data into code. Digital humanists, as reflective designers, document, digitize, and arrange resources to create a digital archive. This archive is then encoded to construct an ‘intellectual model’, a phrase coined by Johanna Drucker, an American author, visual theorist, and cultural critic (2009, Drucker). The digitalization of our world today has allowed all of us to become reflective designers. During my studies at Dominica State College, I am constantly recording, digitizing, and organizing numerous direct and indirect sources to produce academic papers and reports. I also occasionally interact with digital archives when accessing platforms such as Google Books, which allows users such as myself to access a digital database of books and magazines that have been scanned and converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR) software.

Since digital humanities initiatives provide digital archives, and grant-funded work is also accompanied by a narrative that outlines the creator’s goals, Tom Scheinfedlt, an Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at Connecticut University, argues that digital humanities projects should not be decoded from code to text (Owens, 2011). Converting the project would simply be moving information from one platform to another (Owens, 2011).

Rather, Trevor Owen, a digital archivist, advises that after a project, digital humanists should produce a reflective article that solidifies what they learned (Owens, 2011). Through my coursework, I have also written numerous reflective pieces, which have increased my self-awareness and improved my critical thinking skills. This is because I am analyzing how concepts interrelate to produce ideas that can be implemented in the real world, rather than focus simply on outcomes, such as grades. When writing reflective articles, Owen suggests that digital scholars not merely describe the process and communicate results, but seek to understand them by commenting on what they intended to do, what they accomplished, and what they learned along the way.

Nonetheless, digital scholars’ goals will never fully represent the result of a digital humanities project. Herman Melville, an American writer and poet, once stated that his work, “Moby Dick,” is only a “glancing bird’s eye perspective” of what nations have said, spoken, imagined, and sung, regardless of how accurate it appears to be (Owens, 2011). This characteristic is true for the digital humanities; what was created is not the same as what was meant to be created, because technology, tools, and practices are highly unstable and unpredictable (Thomas, 2011). This is a fact that I, as a competent programmer, am all too acquainted with. Before starting a project, I try to outline the essential processes, data types, and programming concepts that need to be followed to achieve a certain goal. However, during execution, I may run into obstacles due to gaps in my thinking which cause me to rethink or review my plan. As a result, neither my output nor the actions I took are identical to what I set out to achieve.

Word Count – 520 words

Citations:

Drucker, J. (2009). SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (1st ed., Vol. 15). University of Chicago Press.

Owens, T. (2011, November 11). » Please Write it Down: Design and Research in Digital Humanities Journal of Digital Humanities. Journal of Digital Humanities. http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/please-write-it-down-by-trevor-owens/

Posner, M. (2013, August 29). How did they make that? – Miriam Posner’s Blog. Miriam Posner’s Blog. http://miriamposner.com/blog/how-did-they-make-that/

Thomas, W. G. (2011, October 15). » What We Think We Will Build and What We Build in Digital Humanities Journal of Digital Humanities. Journal of Digital Humanities. http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/what-we-think-we-will-build-and-what-we-build-in-digital-humanities-by-will-thomas/#what-we-think-we-will-build-and-what-we-build-in-digital-humanities-by-will-thomas-n-1