Digital Humanities is a production-based endeavor in which theoretical issues get tested in the design of implementations, and implementations are loci of theoretical reflection and elaboration
Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 3.
This sentence resonates with me greatly, as it captures the core characteristic of Digital Humanities: the dynamic, generative cycle between theory and practice. In the past, I always thought theory came before practice. However, in digital humanities, it breaks this traditional humanities role. In DH, theory is with “building”. The process of building a database, a 3D modeling, and a visualization projects is a way of checking whether the the theory is practical or if it exposes any problems. Also, it says that implementation is not only the end but also a beginning. When doing a project, the appearance of the subject and the interactive ways all forces creators and users to think that why is knowledge visualized in this form? What values and narratives does this design communicate? Which points out the concept of “designing argument” in this book. This iterative process of “learning by doing and doing by learning” is full of creative and intellectual tension, which is really compelling and different from traditional humanities.
In the past, I only approached some humanities subjects such as anthropology, which uses words to demonstrate some social problems. However, in DH, it combines the humanities with computational techniques, which makes the words less empty. When we compelete the google form, we just type our answers of some questions. But the AI can analyze these words to show the basic logic of this words. For instance, AI can tell us the most popular major among the people through the google form they completed. At the time I first found this way to use graphs or other simple math tools to analyze words, I felt really excited. Now I am interested in use some visualization projects to express my ideas instead of just writing papers. For instance, when I looking at a painting about the place, I can use 3D modeling to build this place instead of just using papers to dicuss the content of the painting. In the future, I want my academic work to be not a monologue, but a dialogue—a conversation with technology, with collaborators, and ultimately with the public.
The most attrative parts for me is the critical design and digital storytelling part. I hope to learn and practice how to design immersive narrative experiences, blending text, images, sound, archival materials, and data visualization to create “playable arguments” that provoke critical thinking in the user. Also, I want to explore how the complexity ain the humanities can represented in visualization, rather than being reduced to cold numbers and graphs. This would allow visualization to become a powerful hermeneutic tool, not just a presentation tool.
Tags: Refelection, Digital Humanities
