In completing my final project for my digital praxis class I finally came up with my personal definition of digital humanities.
I included it in the 32-page paper as this "reflective sidebar."
In the spirit of zine makers being people I know well, I would like to take a second to consider feelings. I wrote in my notes:
My experience with Tableau Public (TP) may be colored by the fact that I am annoyed by its free-as-in-beer-for-some-people-and-not-at-all-free-as-in-speech status and the fact that you have to log in every step of the way. I dutifully created an account on my computer and downloaded the software, but when I tried to launch it, I got an error message:
Zine Content Comparison
Introduction
As the curator and cataloger of a zine library with holdings going back to the early 1990s I am sometimes asked to comment on how zines have changed over time. I read and catalog zines out of time, as they rise to the top of the processing queue, which makes it hard to respond to that question with confidence, though I have my theories. My suspicion is that zine creators in the 1990s wrote more about sexual assault and critiqued capitalist systems of oppression more than their 2010s counterparts, who are more likely to write about mental health and friendship. My informed assumptions extend to the visual elements of the works, with 1990s creators working primarily, even exclusively, in black and white photocopies with photographs, reproduced zine ads, hand drawings, and riot grrrl fliers, as opposed to more sophisticated reprography, desktop publishing (InDesign, rather than Publisher or analog cut and paste).
I spent the last week as an editor-at-large on dh+lib: where the digital humanities and libraries meet.
One of last week's class discussion topics was reading, and reading is one of my favorite things, mostly to do. I hadn't thought about thinking about it. I'm a pleasure reader, so concerned about literary scholarly apparatus only in the sense that I am also a librarian and think publishers who release nonfiction books without a bibliography and index should be given a vicious wedgie.
Now that I am thinking about reading in a more academic way, my mind is spinning with it. I woke up this morning contemplating the concept of print books as "old media," literature being read in the one-vs.-many paradigm, whether social reading is merely social or also pedagogical, and how brains process text vs. computers. Further, I got to a topic that my group touched on but didn't explore in the report back, which is note taking.
Blog Post #1 for Digital Humanities Praxis
I'm calling this post "People with Fingers and Toes” because when I announced on Facebook that I was starting a program in digital humanities, and I inevitably got the “what does that mean?” question and didn’t have a great answer, one of my friends suggested it was the study of humans’ digits–people with fingers and toes. That may not be an original joke, but it was new-to-me, and while I didn’t laugh myself silly over it as my friend Kate did, I thought it was cute. What I didn’t think was that it had any bearing on the topics I’d be exposed to in class.
