What Digital Humanities Means To Me

I’m not going to lie, I was that person that raised their hand on the first day of class for taking the course because it fit into my schedule. I knew I needed a recent English course for my concentration and I thought to myself “I’ve grown up in the digital age. How hard can this course be?” To be honest, I didn’t really know what to expect when I signed up, but I definitely did not think it was going to be another Humanities class. Last semester I had to take the Humanities requirement for my major. Let’s just say it wasn’t my favorite class. All we did was read old literature that kind of made sense and then discussed it in class which made me even more confused. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy reading and that’s partially why I chose English as my concentration, but old literature is not my forte. Anyways, my point is I had no idea this was going to be another Humanities class and it made me a little nervous. I became more stressed when we started to discuss with our partners about our knowledge with computers and my partner mentioned coding. I thought “OMG! I didn’t even think about that being an aspect of the digital age.” As a result of my personal experience with Humanities, I didn’t even think that it could have a relationship with computers because my course was so “old school”.

Before this course, I had the basic, and I mean basic, knowledge of computing. I’m talking about knowing how to use Microsoft Word, Netflix, and iTunes. I remember getting my computer the summer before I started my freshman year of college and not knowing what to do on it. First of all, I had to learn how to navigate a Mac because up until then I had only used Windows. After getting a basic understanding of how to work my Mac I thought I was so cool. It was my very first personal laptop and it was the newest model so I was feeling special. I would just lay in bed and stare at it because I didn’t have anything to do on it because it was summer and there was no school work to do on it. At any rate, that’s how low my general knowledge of computing was. I guess this is because my parents have never been into technology so I never grew up with it. We always had tvs and a computer at home, but they always had the basic cell phones and they didn’t allow me to have a cell phone or a tv in my room until junior year of high school. However, as I worked my way through my community college I started to use my computer more and more and definitely became more comfortable with it. My sophomore year my Future Educator’s Club traveled to Tampa, Florida for the CEC (Council for Exceptional Children) Conference. There, we listened to a keynote speaker who was the author of the book Life, Animated. He told the story of his son, Owen, who has autism and how they overcame their journey by watching animated Disney movies. Our club brought this book and information back to school and did a book study on it. We also managed a number of events for Autism Awareness Month. I was in charge of creating an interactive activity for our viewers. I chose a sight called “Poll Everywhere” which allowed me to create polls that related to autism and the audience could answer these polls on their phone or laptop. We had a good amount of people show up for our events and they were very successful. Moral of the story, over time I have become more and more comfortable with working with my machine and I think that’s why I was open minded when registering for this course.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still not a genius when it comes to computing and I still don’t really know what coding is. However, the more I sit in on this course and learn more about it and how far it has come since what we read about in The Information, I feel honored that I have the opportunity to learn such a concept. It’s not necessarily an interest for me and I’m not sure how I will use it in the future, but it’s cool that I’m learning something that was a foreign language to me before and something I never thought I’d learn while going to school for Education.

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