In Lincoln Mullen’s essay, “Digital Humanities is a Spectrum, or ‘We’re All Digital Humanists Now'”, he makes the argument that the digital humanities is a spectrum, or in other words, a tool used to classify things. In all of the examples of traditional scholars doing traditional things, Mullen makes the comparison that though we have done these same tasks (historian keeping notes, teacher making assignments) even scholars that don’t name themselves as digital humanists are doing just what a digital humanist does–and this is where he makes the case for the spectrum. If there’s two sides to one task a scholar is completing, and one of them involves transferring paper words into digital words, that is being a digital humanist.<\/p>\n
Although the spectrum Mullen is talking about seems to be pretty balanced on each side of the binaries, some of the digital humanists we have been studying recently seem to be on one side or the other. Melissa Terras is on the digital side of the spectrum, even though she seems to not even be labeled as a digital humanist in the first place. We humanities people look at Terras as a data compiler who then wrote an article about her findings and logical reasoning. In order to get that kind of data, she probably went online to network for data and then to collate the data. This is interesting to me because it’s like the chicken and the egg question: which came first? For different backgrounds and studies, like Terras vs. Liming, they both would take different paths to get to the same article topic, based on their knowledge at hand which is the Arts & Sciences vs. Arts & Humanities. Did the Data-Binary of the spectrum come first, or did Liming’s Literary-Binary come first? Either way, Mullen says that whichever side you start out on on your *digital humanities journey*, all of us are gradually moving to the other side, pulling concepts and tools from the other side to create the balance of the entire scale equal.<\/p>\n
I can be found quite evenly balanced on the spectrum, as can most young adults of my generation. In our case, it wasn’t a chicken or the egg dispute, because we were brought into a world where both the digital side and the print side were already established; so we learned both simultaneously. I use digital humanity scholarship every day. It wasn’t until this last week when I was researching how to get a job in publishing, that I realized that there is a job title for people who design book covers. First of all, how awesome would that job be? Second of all, so much work must be put into that job. The publishing house likes an author’s manuscript, so they edit it up and get ready for a cover, and the cover designer communicates with the author to see what are the most important ideas or scenes in the novel, and then with Photoshop or whatever program, they put those elements into a visual to showcase the book. That is so cool! And that is such a clear example of digital humanities, of this spectrum, where the two people involved in the making of this novel are from different sides, but pair together to make one awesome book cover. In my life, since I’m just a measly broke college student and not in publishing, I have a book review blog with exactly one follower: my roommate. But I read my two books a week and then get all professional online where I convince myself people are reading what I have to say about Frank Wheeler being an ass in\u00a0Revolutionary<\/em> Road…it’s not just about typing words online, it’s inserting media next to my text, it’s finding a star online that I can copy and paste one to five times for a rating, and scrolling through meme or gif databases to insert a formatted html to capture what I’m feeling in something not\u00a0<\/em>text. Digital humanities encompasses so much of my day to day things it is crazy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In Lincoln Mullen’s essay, “Digital Humanities is a Spectrum, or ‘We’re All Digital Humanists Now’”, he makes the argument that the digital humanities is a spectrum, or in other words, a tool used to classify things. In all of the examples of traditional scholars doing traditional things, Mullen makes the comparison that though we have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":559,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions\/559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}