Reflective Blog Post, Week 1

“The digital environment offers expanded possibilities for exploring multiple approaches to what constitutes knowledge and what methods qualify as valid
for its production.”

Burdick et al. “One: Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 24.

Technology has walked beside us for a long time now. With technology, we are able to collaborate and foster new ideas to further develop our own knowledge and draw conclusions from our findings. From this, I resonated with this quote from the chapter “Humanities to Digital Humanities” in the book Digital_Humanities because, the incorporation of technology has been something that I value as a student and as someone interested in the mixture of Data Science and Education, so seeing this quote has peaked my interest as it gives me a perspective on how the digital world is being used in the modern era. This quote also does a nice job of acknowledging and using the work of digitalization as a helpful resource for people to accept various works, like models, as well as being a gateway to open doors for creation. 

Due to my interests in education, I’m in a math teaching class where we look at ways to teach and the history of learning math, so I’ve been interested in different approaches to help students learn math. Growing up, it was really important for me to understand the concepts of math, so while this chapter points out a formal way of learning, such as research papers, this passage brought up a good point that there are other ways to learn that the digital environment invites, like games and design. This passage has also made me think about how accessible and accepting digital technology is for a person. In this way, the digital environment has enabled a nonlinear approach to getting information, which is something I didn’t consider before. 

As we continue through the course, I am interested in learning about data visualizations. I hope to use what I learned from this technique to effectively represent data cohesively. This is because I think a visual aid is really important to a viewer, and so understanding and practicing this technique can help someone get a better understanding of what they are doing, whether it’s research or something else. Another thing that interests me is data analysis because I know a little bit about the career field and would like to dive deeper into how an immense amount of data can reveal insight alongside traditional scholarship.