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

Author: P_drake

I am single dad I have a 15 year old girl who I have been raising since she was 2 years old with out her mom being involved. I am in my junior year here at UOP hopefully getting in the Masters program of accounting.

Digital Humanities

What is Digital Humanities? Why the Digital Humanities? I still not sure after a few week in the class what digital Humanities still is.  We have been shown so many examples over the last two weeks. In the first reading Ian Bogost he is points out that most of our live are control in some aspect by an algorithm. The second reading which was one of the hardest thing I have ever read to comprehend. The next few reading were a little easier to understand they were about how technology can be used to scan reading the program we introduced to was Voyant. The article scanned court cases from the time of the civil war they showed how certain words were referred to slavery one was one and these cases were from the south and how the one from the north were different. The clinical meaning of what Digital Humanities is according to google it is the study of the intersection of computing and the discipline of Humanities. Some of our reading have been very confusing to me. But as I write this post I think a few thing our coming together for me now. Example when we used Voyant we looked at Shakespeare work. We looked at the word “love” throughout his works, in some of the stories where the love appeared like some of his comedies “love” was very frequently used. The why of digital Humanities, computers and technology let us as human study so much more and so much faster when it comes to information. I would hate to think how long it would take to read and analyze Shakespeare work to see if there was a pattern with it coming to a frequency of a word used. Technology does makes our live easier but we also have lost some of what we call the personal touch. I was a manager in the restaurant business for over 20 years. When I first was in the business world it was us going filling out an application and handing it to a manager, now it go to our website fill it out and I am sure there is an algorithm picking out who they talk to a for an interview.

Voyant

As we looked at Voyant in class and now at home this is a very interesting tool. This is something I have never heard or seen before in my years on this earth.  I am very impressed by this tool. As we saw in class it will counts all the words in a text or even a series of books as we saw with the Shakespeare download and gives us a Word cloud and many other useful tools. In the word cloud the words that are used the most are represented by larger images of the words. It allows us to filter word from the text so we can specifically see at certain words or groups of words.download

 

By clicking on a word we can see graphs of statistically information as we seen in all the Shakespeare file. As demonstrated by our Professor with word love. I chose the word “Thou” and have inserted the graph showing the results.chart

 

This tool I would guess would allow us to do many different possibilities when we are doing research to break down a text in a different way. It allow students a teacher, anyone doing research to see how many times a word appears in a text, we can also by selecting a word click on any text and see the passage where appears. Which will help a person to analyze maybe how the word is being used in a sentence or paragraph. In my scholastic endeavor I am not sure how I will use this other than maybe for our class. It will be fun to play with it.