RELI/ENGL 39, Fall 2015, University of the Pacific

Author: M_scott13

Palladio and working with mapping

These past couple weeks we have been working with an application called Palladio. To be honest I don’t really like it and its been very hard for me to navigate and has given me troubles; however, I did find it helpful how Professor Schroeder gave us the walk through sheet for how to use Palladio to creating graphs and maps and without that I’d probably have no idea of how to do it.  I didn’t get far enough to create a map because I got stuck at the inserting the data stage.  I was able to insert the first attribute data set but when I tried to put the second one in to create the map, Palladio wouldn’t let me for some reason, which was very frustrating. I was following all the steps and it still wouldn’t work.

The accuracy of maps…. or not ?

imageA map is not a picture!!  This reading had me thinking more deeply about how accurate the maps that we use today really are compared to how accurate we think they are… In the reading, i like how the author compared photographed maps to magazine covers which i thought was a really good example of showing how maps do not show exactly what we think we are viewing which is kind of like an illusion in a sense because most of the stuff we see on covers of magazines for advertisment look nothing like they do in reality. Things are edited and changed to look more appealing, which could potentially be biased because the information can be different from the original and can be inaccurate. When the original maps are remade, many details may be altered and changed to be more convenient and that’s why we can’t say that a map is esentially a picture because a picture shows something as it is whereas maps arent always as exact as they may appear. The same thing can be done with maps. We dont carry actual maps we can just use our cell phones or some other type of technology. I have had many incidents where i have tried using the google maps gps naviagation on my phone or ipad and it got me lost.  From the picture, It “looked” like it was the way to go but it wasn’t and it ended up rerouting me.

This picture here is just a  map of our world and its basically just to show that litle things on this map could be slightly off for all we know because things are constantly changing which is another reason why we cant rely on maps 100%

Defining digital humanities ….

According to one of the required articles I read for the reading the author says “It is imperative that digital humanities work take into account the important insights of disability studies in the humanities, an interdisciplinary field that considers disability not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do.” Digital humanities is becoming increasingly popular as far as focus. There are now hundreds of digital humanities centers worldwide and the digital humanities subject is taught in at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Yet, there’s no solidity yet in defining digital humanities. The first article, “The Digital Humanities is not about Building it’s about Sharing” by Mark Sample was very similar to te title of the article. Sample believed that in Digital Humanities, knowledge is not produced and is shared and reproduced.

The term is much debated and has not yet fully established its identity due to the fact that researchers are still continuously finding more and more things they can do with DH tools and methods. So just because no one really knows the exact definition, we still may have an idea.  There are many different outlooks and and opinions about how people define the term digital humanities. I don’t believe that there is a right or wrong answer as to what you think digital humanities is, it’s more of what you get out of it. After just a couple weeks of being in class I’m still not exactly sure what DH is but thus far my outlook on digital humanities is that it expresses the fields of computer science, an area of research. Digital humanities gathers information from articles published over the past 10 or so years and explores the digital humanities field. DH looks at current and past events.

 

 

Ahmanni S.