Digital Humanities Blog

 There was a time in my life when I could fly through a book in a day or even an entire night without taking a break to eat or drink. There was a time when I had the ability to fully engage in the art of reading and comprehend, even those parts in a book that are usually uninteresting and often deemed to be “page-fillers.” It was only this year that I realized how much less my brain has gotten at engaging with long-form content, especially written text. I heard a modern-day philosopher from back home describe reading as the highest form of listening. His reasoning was that when you read a book or some kind of long text, you just sit down, shut up, and listen to what the person has to say. And right now, I’ve reached a stage where I can’t fully hold onto trains of thought without getting sidetracked. Okay, maybe I am not as bad as I’m making myself out to be, but in contrast to how I used to conduct myself, this revelation was pretty daunting. It came to me while I was doing a rea...

Tools used: OpenRefine, Python, Python Libraries (Pandas and Matplotlib) I decided to refer back to my data science class from freshman year and highschool and brush off in using python script and python libraries to clean, reorganize and render the data Initial Goal: To find some trend on the frequency of heat. Steps taken: Uploaded the raw CSV file into OpenRefine to delete columns that restart the process and to appropriately split and align columns  Used python script to read csv file Deleted the rows of new process data  Converted the heat binary to float to see the mean and the percentage of how often heat is turned on  Got a percentage of the amount of time heater was on (~40%) minority of the time Exported the cleaned csv data Tried to plot the trends of heat with other variables (this is still a work in progress) Reflection:  I feel good about the output. I think with more studying and time, I could focus on a wider array of insights and provide a more accur...

This week’s reflection is just going to be a bunch of questions I have that I may have more conversations about with multiple people in the future. I’m sorry that these might seem out of context and lack a bit of introspection like my other reflections, but I think jotting these questions down helped me identify my thought process much better. How do digital spaces influence the way history is written, especially since, on balance, every single one of us has a mode of expression to the masses? Are there, or could there ever be, safeguards to ensure the passing down of accurate history? Would this create societal in-cohesion to the point that truth gets so convoluted that we pass a point of no return? In regard to the point raised about “silenced stories of the past” or histories that we don’t have accurate tracing of, can digital development help in identifying and ironing out details to find the truth of the past? Does technology really care about truth? What does this mean in terms o...

During our class presentation, we talked about how creative spaces (art) can influence technology and innovation, and how technology can also be a muse for storytelling. I really love this cyclical relationship between the two fields. Sometimes they enable one another to exist, expand, and think deeply about various things. They create constraints, but they also create a free space for imagination and creativity to take place. The most interesting aspect of this is that behind both technological development and creative work, the core idea is imagination. Before any planning, design, process, or fleshing out, it all starts as an idea. And if that idea is truly innovative, it requires some form of imagination from the person who holds it. The innovator must think outside the box to find ways to solve a problem or make life easier in some way, shape, or form—something that hasn’t been attempted before. The creative artist thinks about new and inventive ways to express and reflect real-li...

  https://drive.google.com/file/d/17vTVToDii6bgZdoZkRkxK9PMtOXbkcd8/view?usp=sharing

At times, innovations related to the humanities rub me the wrong way. I never understood why or the actual reason for my distaste, but recently, as I’ve been going through this class, I’ve come to understand my sense of perception and reasoning better. Technology throughout cultures and time has always been used to solve problems, improve quality of life, and promote human flourishing. At times, technology alleviates matters of survival. To take a basic example: living in Spokane, Washington, in the month of January with no heating might actually be fatal. But with the technology and innovation of man, we exist without even thinking twice about the tech, not even bothered to understand how it exactly works. It creates a space of comfort to the point where we are completely disconnected from the problem; the innovation becomes the new normal, and the initial need shifts to being a rarity. That is the power of technology. However, as of recent, technology in Western countries has evolved...