Category: Perspectives

I have never been overly proficient in computers or technology of really any kind. I, however, have never run into any serious problems with computer or technology to challenge my knowledge. This class, while not a serious problem, has me doing things with my computer that I have never really done nor thought could be done. I always understood what coding was and that there are different ways to do so–I knew there was HTML and I had heard of python and mathematica, but I had never truly used these systems before. In fact, I had mostly been afraid of them. The ideas of algebra seemed complicated to me and so how was I supposed to figure out the language of computers? Since computers stem from mathematics and algorithms, I did not think I would have been capable of understanding them. Then, I started my internship.

In the Fall semester of 2018, I started a library instruction internship where I began to learn how to be a research librarian. While most of librarianship is understanding how to use databases, there is also a whole sector of creating webpages, websites, databases, and more. While most of the moderators make it easy to use the site, sometimes I had to go into the HTML to make things look exactly how I want and so I had to stop being afraid of coding. I realized a lot of coding is less knowing the specific parts of the language itself, but knowing how those parts work together. The more I played around with HTML, the more comfortable I got with it–I am no master of coding, but I do have a strong confidence in being able to learn how to use certain methods.

I decided to take this class to learn a little more about how to control a computer as I want to go into the field of librarianship and research–and as we know, humanities is becoming more and more digital, and as an English major I want to be able to keep up with different forms of presenting, analyzing, and creating literature and/or texts. What this class has taught me the most so far: how to follow steps.

There have been some classes that I have fallen so behind in that I start becoming frazzled and annoyed. Instead of letting myself spiral, I would start from the beginning and just slowly work my way through each step until I got to the problem area. Sometimes, there would just be no problem anymore. Other times, I would have to fish around different parts of my computer to find a setting or button to change. While the confusion is aggravating, it also has allowed me to become more and more familiar with what is on my computer and in my system settings. I think another part to feeling comfortable in any discipline is knowing the foundation–and the foundation here would be just understanding the basics of a computer. The more I get to understand the anatomy of my device, the more confident I am in handling any issues that may come up and therefore the more confident I am in my computer skills.

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.

Besides my laptop, there is only one other computer in my home which my mom mainly uses to watch antique shows, play solitaire, and print coupons. My dad will occasionally browse for news articles, but I am the only one in my family that knows how to fully navigate the web and computer programs. Perhaps this is where my false confidence in my computation skills have originated from. When it comes to how my own technology operates, I consider myself well-versed. If someone asked me how tech-savvy I am, however, I put on an air of humbleness as if I don’t understand technology. Yet when anyone offers to show me a better way or new way to utilize a function on my computer, I claim that I don’t need help or reluctantly agree. Of course, I know that there are numerous aspects of my computer that, if I could learn to utilize properly, would help me perform and understand daily tasks. However, I am resistant to change when it comes to a system that I have had no problems with previously. I have used Microsoft since high school and although I’m pushed to use Google slides and documents for many group projects in college, it will never become the ‘norm’ for me. When I came the first ENGL 340 class, I had brought with me years of experience in using a computer for entertainment and work since elementary school. I was confident in my skills with my computer because I was good at using it to complete what I needed, but I never pushed myself to learn more about my computer than what was necessary.

The command prompt was a foreign concept to me, something that I knew existed but never thought about. If I had any concerns or questions regarding the use of my computer I would turn to Google where I would usually find an answer to a way to evade the problem with the same end result. Although I’m comfortable with where I am with my computer, I find a lot of the different computations we go over in class interesting. The information in The Information is especially interesting and has opened up my eyes to the relationship between computers and humanities which I never gave much thought too before. I didn’t see all the different ways these two things were connected let alone how it connected to basically everything. Although the text is dense with endless information, things such as binary opened my mind up in a way I didn’t expect from an English course. Maybe I should start exploring parts of technology I don’t necessarily need so that I can better understand the world around me.

I have to admit when I signed up for this class, I had no idea what to expect. I am an English Adolescence Education major at Geneseo and needed to add another course to my schedule. On the first day, we were asked to define what digital humanities is and I struggled with this question extremely. Digital humanities was definitely not a term used in my everyday vocabulary. The title of this course intrigued me and I was eager to explore what digital humanities was all about since it was a topic so foreign to me. The Monday and Wednesday time slot fit perfectly into my schedule and I thought I should take a risk for once and give it a shot! After going over the syllabus and the course’s expectations, I was extremely nervous and worried that I would not have what it takes to do well in this course since I had barely any prior knowledge about computers. I can type fast and that is about all I can do when it comes to computer talent!

The words binary and coding were very unfamiliar to me. I have never had a good relationship with my computer in the past and felt if anything, my computer has given me nothing but a headache. Whenever something happens with my computer, I often look to google and see if I can figured it out myself. Unfortunately, a lot of the time I cannot and have to go to CIT to help me. Last semester, my hard drive failed on me which was the peak of frustration with my computer. Everyday I was forced to rent out a computer every four hours and I was not allowed to borrow it over night. I am sure anyone could imagine how irritating this could be right in the middle of the semester! I also lost everything on my computer but learned the valuable lesson of how important it is to back up your pictures and other documents somewhere else.

In the future, I plan on becoming a teacher and would love to share my knowledge on computers and technology in general. Technology is quickly advancing and has become so dominant in today’s society, so it is essential for teachers to be able to teach their students how to understand and work with it. Inventions such as the smart board have made a huge impact in the teaching world and new inventions are constantly arising. The newer generations have become so reliant on technology that is important to include technology based lessons so that you can keep students engaged and interested. When I was in high school, we practically had a smart board in every single room and I still had teachers refuse to use them because either they simply did not know how to use them, were not educated on how, or they were old fashioned and did not believe in using it. This made learning much more boring and redundant. I believe that schools should implement programs for teachers where they can learn the best way to integrate technology into their everyday teaching and make the learning experience much more exciting.

Although I do not have much experience with my computer, my iPhone is a completely different story. Similar to most people, I am addicted to my phone. When I wake up I check it, during class I check it, and a lot of the time, it keeps me up late at night. I believe that we do not take advantage of what technology has to offer, instead, we are all just stuck on social media when there is so much more to know and learn.

Almost a month later of being this class and I have learned so much. I love the different approach this course takes. Most english classes are just discussion based and get repetitive and boring, however, this class is hands on and we get time to navigate our computers during class time. It is the perfect balance. Each day we explore new things and I can actually say I learn something new every class period. I never knew applications such as Atom and VirtualBox even existed. I am so glad that my eyes have been opened to other applications, other than your simple basic stickies or photo booth.

 

 

 

 

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.

Prior to taking this course, I had a close but toxic relationship with my computer. This peculiar bond was formed through my experiences as a dedicated yet struggling physics major in the first half of my college career. In my freshman and sophomore years, my homework sets were posted and completed online and often required the use and mastery of programming software such as Mathematica, MatLab, and even Python. My computer followed me wherever I went until the device started to feel almost like a vital extension of myself.

Though I was very familiar with the aforementioned software, I never felt as though I truly understood what I was doing and I depended heavily upon troubleshooting and resources like stack exchange and friends to complete assignments. Additionally, due to my insecurities regarding my mathematical abilities, I became extremely reliant upon Mathematica to solve math problems for me and lost even more confidence as a result of this dependence. While some would have considered me adept at technology, specifically computers, I felt as though I never really understood what I was doing or why I was either able or unable to do it.

In my sophomore year, I took Geneseo’s interdepartmental programming class where the primary programming language learned was Python. Despite the warmth of the instructor and the generous support they offered, my comfort level in Python nevertheless remained low. I knew the terms such as string, list, and variable, as well as the different commands. However, I found myself unable to apply this knowledge and complete problems assigned in Stepik, the course homework site. Though I had the tools needed to solve problems such as the infamous Caesar Cipher, I felt frustrated that I could not consolidate my knowledge and deduced that programming, and computer science in general, just were not for me.

Then, at the start of my junior year, I realized that while I harbor a great interest in and love for physics and the sciences at large, my true passion is for English and the humanities. So, I declared an English major and named physics as my minor. Initially, I believed that my transition to the English major would effectively divorce me from my computer and end my tumultuous reliance upon it. In my general education humanities course, I only ever needed my computer for writing essays which I would then print and effectively bring into the physical, instead of the digital, world.

Furthermore, I had always associated computing with physics and math since these subjects relied a great deal upon computers and technology whereas I perceived the humanities to be focused on the texts, ideas, and objects of past human civilizations. However, this perception soon changed as I began the English major and became involved in discussing literature in the modern era while blogging about said literature and its connections with the many issues that humanity faces now and with those it has arguably always faced. Moreover, my involvement in this course and my introduction to the term “Digital Humanities” has further challenged my previous beliefs by demonstrating exactly how the digital world interacts with the humanities and how each entity benefits from and is informed by the other. Specifically, reading James Gleick’s The Information has been particularly helpful in demonstrating the symbiotic relationship the digital world has and has had with the humanities. Most notably, Gleick’s superb storytelling ability, a skill one might refer to as a byproduct of studying the humanities, allows readers to better understand the development and evolution of digital computing and communication.

On the other hand, digital tools like computers are extremely helpful when it comes to studying, analyzing, and appreciating the humanities. In class, we have already seen how we can use Python to analyze the word choice, particularly the percent of unique words used, in Thoreau’s Walden. In this way, Python serves as a tool that can supplement other methods of literary analysis to provide readers with a more holistic understanding of Walden. Additionally, the internet, a large facet of the digital world, allows for the texts of the past to be not only preserved but shared on a larger scale than ever before thereby granting more people access to the ideas and objects regarded as facets of the humanities. Furthermore, the internet provides a platform for which greater quantities of diverse stories, art, culture may be shared and appreciated.

While this class has already substantially challenged my belief regarding the relationship between computers and the humanities it has also challenged beliefs I had about myself and my own capabilities. Where I once thought that computing completely evaded my ability, I know now that I am capable of further learning and of applying the knowledge I gained through my experiences as a physics major. I am dedicated to shifting my relationship with my computer from an antagonistic and negative one to a symbiotic and positive one through the experiences I will gather in English 340.

I can remember a time when I believed computer science and the humanities represented what Stephen Jay Gould would call non-overlapping magesterium. In other words, the two fields emerged from completely different epistemic origins; they had little (if anything at all) to do with each other. This had to be true. I hated working with computers, I became easily frustrated doing so, and I felt inherently different from those of my peers who found computing so natural. The TI-84 on my trig class desk would taunt me for 40 minutes a day throughout all of 10th grade. Meanwhile, I felt at home in my literature and history classes. I loved books, both for their readability and their materiality. I enjoyed my copy of Grapes of Wrath for both the story and the pulpy pages themselves. Hence, I began to develop a sense that computers had simply no place in my humanist education and, likewise, it made sense that my STEM focused peers would have such a distaste for reading books. I can remember this time because it was not too long ago. In fact, it wasn’t until last semester that I uncovered the deeply human nature of the device on which type right now.

Working with Dr. Schacht last fall on a versioning project about W.B. Yeats’s later poetry not only made me more familiar with my computer; it granted me access to a whole new plane of thinking about language. Writing xml documents for this project in Atom and Oxygen created a discussion between my computer and Yeats’s manuscripts. In this way, computers can be Rosetta Stones, engaging different languages simultaneously to present new ways of expressing similar ideas. While I was never one for computer based assignments, this kind of work reminded me of the fun I would have translating Virgil and Catullus in high school Latin. Both demanded a delicacy and respect for the texts. Perhaps the most exciting prospect of this work, though, was the potential of expanding the accessibility of the humanist education.

There is a momentum to digital communication. Too often, books remain on shelves or in the backpacks of disinterested students. By bringing humanist work to the computer, the probability of it reaching more people skyrockets. With social platforms abound, people will run into more and more content that (hopefully) reflects their interests and the continuation of sharing can go on ad infinitum. The self-organizing aspect of some internet tools can be admittedly quite scary and I am not even remotely close to grasping the behind-the-scenes activity of this kind of communication. However, I see a very democratic potential in all of this. One of my main focuses in creating a digital version of Yeats’s poetry was bringing the text to those who couldn’t access the pricey and rare Cornell Manuscript Series. This semester of work got me excited to do more investigating with my computer and ultimately prompted me to take English 340 this spring.

After a few short months of learning more than I had in the previous 20 years, I feel much more comfortable with my computer. However, I recognize the limitlessness of such an endeavor and realize that I may never master these skills which, in a way, is why computing is so similar to the humanities. We don’t seek mastery of literature, rather we read in order to read more; there is no endpoint. Similarly, the reading we’ve done until now will help us in the reading we look forward to doing. In learning xml I didn’t learn all coding and all codes, but I did come to understand appreciate the symbolic nature of such languages and learning one has certainly made learning the next easier. There is a logic to this. It is no mistake that themes in both my English classes and my STEM classes here at Geneseo can find their beginnings in that one philosophy class I took freshman year: Introduction to logic.

It would be a fallacy to say that I am much more comfortable with computing only as a result my humanities classes. Sure, literature helped me step into the cold water of this new way of thinking, but thinking of the two as overlapping has given me the confidence to dive deeper. Thus, while I may not always understand my computer, I am now all the more excited to try and figure it out. What I once saw as a walled-off territory of inaccessible knowledge I now see as an horizon that beckons for further exploration.