In beginning this course, I honestly did not know what to expect. In reading the course description when I initially signed up, I believed I would be creating and running a blog around some readings we would be doing in class. In reading through the syllabus the day before our first class, I quickly realized it would be different than I expected. I believed that we would be covering how those who study the humanities were able to digitize a collection and how they collaborated through new technology. I imagined the class to be us studying how others were using technology instead of us actually being the ones doing it.
The humanities was a strange area for technology to be integrated, in my opinion. When I thought about the humanities, I found myself imagining a large library full of texts and a scholar hunched over a novel. This is may have been the case at one point but it certainly has changed since then. The humanities require collaboration. Humans have always had a need to work together since the dawn of time. Through collaboration, humans built the first civilizations and began to establish a way of life that seems familiar to us today. Most humans today cannot connect with nomads or hunting/gathering societies. We find our roots in Mesopotamia and Egypt in civilizations that have a structure similar to our own.
In studying the humanities, we look back on these early civilizations for answers regarding our beginnings. We want to understand how this all came to be. Well maybe only those who have chosen the study of humanity care about that question; every day people probably have other things on their minds. But regardless, there is a need to know. I believe the reason Google became such a mainstay in our lives is because people want to know. In a under a minute, I could be looking up the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein on my phone and reading about the cultural impact of the musical Oklahoma. Humans are constantly seeking answers to all of life’s mysteries or even the most basic questions.
This is why I now understand why technology is so important to the study of the humanities. We want to know and connect with others who share that same interest in the subject. Through collaboration, discoveries are being made with those who live across the ocean. The integration of technology has made it easier for ideas to spread and for new understandings of old texts.
In coming into the course, I saw myself as some sort of advanced novice. I was relatively able to figure out problems with my computer or how to set up programs on my machine through the process of trial and error or just flat out googling the problem. I wasn’t able to understand how to code or read binary but I was able to make something happen somehow.
Technology was a friend to me but it often left me confused and annoyed. I once lost a file for a paper that was due and I lost my mind. I was so upset that laid in bed and cried for a whole afternoon. Of course it was discouraging and I may have overreacted but once I calmed down, I went on a search for the file. The problem was that the auto-recovery feature for Word was saving the files to an obscure folder deep in my hardware. Tracking it down meant going into the containers of Microsoft Word and almost digging it out. Looking back on the incident, I am almost glad that I lost the paper. It was a short one and it hadn’t impacted my grade too much when I turned it in late. It taught me how to find files that were almost hidden within my computer and taught me to be much better about saving my files.
I think that while I’m fairly decent with my computer that I’m weak in fully using it. I am barebones with it and only using it mainly surface level. I would like to expand my knowledge further and understand what processes are being done to make it run. I believe this would make me a better computer user and that I could properly aid my machine if it were to get stuck. I believe more people should have a similar want. Technology is a necessary tool in our modern world. Much of the world is ignorant to the technology because it has developed so rapidly and it is hard to keep up. But I still believe there should be a drive for most people to understand their machine a little bit better than what our current average is. This would make us all a bit smarter and would maybe aid in our relationship with technology.