Wednesday 9 October 2013

Takeaway from DITA Week 2.

DITA is my Digital Architecture class, taught by the wonderful Ernesto Priego. Do go check out his blog and his twitter feed if you have an interest in Digital Humanities and also comics.

Basically this course acts as a small stepping stone to understanding how we have gotten to this point in time where a large portion of our own human history is written and stored via computer and internet. This week was one of the most challenging I believe, given that we had to learn to do HTML and CSS in a lab (I suck at CSS, I am going back to the lab to work on it again just because I suck so badly).

Before this week's lesson I began reading "The Wikipedia Revolution" by Andrew Lih, which was excellent in helping to fill in the questions I had that we were unable to cover in class time. I highly recommend giving the book a go, especially if you have ever used Wikipedia to fill in your own knowledge gaps.

But what I really wanted to talk about that I took away from Week 2 was the following selection from a piece about Digital Humanities:

"Digital humanities is by its nature a hybrid domain, crossing disciplinary boundaries and also traditional barriers between theory and practice, technological implementation and scholarly reflection. But over time this field has developed its own orthodoxies, its internal lines of affiliation and collaboration that have become intellectual paths of least resistance. In a world — perhaps scarcely imagined two decades ago — where digital issues and questions are connected with nearly every area of endeavor, we cannot take for granted a position of centrality. On the contrary, we have to work hard even to remain aware of, let alone to master, the numerous relevant domains that might affect our work and ideas. And at the same time, we need to work hard to explain our work and ideas and to make them visible to those outside our community who may find them useful".  [Digital Humanities Quarterly 2007]

Now just read that again and let it sink in. The Internet and Digital Age today are so prevalent that sometimes I find myself thinking of the first computer in Biblical Terms. In the beginning there was the super computer that only geniuses and million dollar governments and corporations could fund. Fast forward a generation or two and the offspring of Adam are squandering this precious gift with tweets about Justin Bieber and One Direction. 

Or are they?
Is it the evolution of knowledge and humanity that these technologies are shared with the masses? Sure tweens tweeting is possibly one of life's greatest annoyances- but these people have access to the entire universe. No, really- they can access maps of the universe- photos from The Hubble telescope and receive e-mail updates from the Mars Rover! 

I think the thing to take away from week 2 was not just the foundations of building an HTML webpage or information retrieval using LINUX, it is rather the neutrality with which we need to handle the capacity for digital storage and knowledge. The internet in its current form is equal parts computer and human ingenuity. Assuming one is more valuable than the other completely undermines the whole aspect of Digital Humanities. We cannot just rely on the internet to take care of our every need, instead we should nurture our own understanding of where, how, and when our information is stored. In order to have a more cohesive relationship in the Digital Age we must give as easily as we take from technology, that means leaning the programs and skill sets that we rely on others to learn for us. 

Spiderman's recurring theme of "With great power comes great responsibility" comes to mind as a reflection on my utterly horrible post/update/thing. The Digital Age is an amazing time to live in, we have THE UNIVERSE at our very fingertips (and with the advent of talk-to-text we probably don't even need our fingertips anymore now) but we should understand where and how it is derived. It is the same concept as sustainable farming and teaching people where their cheeseburger comes from. Where did this blog post come from? What resources went into its creation? How is it possible for a ditzy white girl to use her own HTML codes to compose this? 

I urge you all to find out on your own time, it's truly remarkable learning to have a symbiotic relationship with technologies. 
Cheers. 

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