The Digital Humanities: My Reflection

Hello reader(s)!

This is my first post on my blog (sorry in advance! 😬). This entry is devoted as a reflection of the book:  The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars. By: Eileen Gardiner and Ronald G. Musto.

The authors discuss the evolution of written text. The first “humanists” focused on the revival of grammar and rhetoric from the “pure” era rather than their “corrupt” years during what we now call the Medieval period. Reviewing ancient Greek and Latin texts, these humanists deciphered, edited, and disseminated printed works throughout Europe.  It is through the Medieval libraries where we begin to see the beginnings of the “modern” library. Libraries of the 20^th century eventually moved away from card catalogs and microfiche and into the digital age. Materials that have been digitized are objects, artifacts, images, sounds, and spaces. Those in charge of deciding what materials were initially important enough and selected for digitizing was up to the librarians and archivists.

This leads me to the main question I had throughout the book. Who had/has access to materials? Many of these digital goods are often behind paywalls. True, there are (now) plenty of open source digital media available on the internet, but in the early digital days, lots of information was available to those who could pay for it. Let’s take this accessibility issue one step further. Since the Medieval period, texts were translated in and from Greek and Latin. Meaning that only people who could read Latin/Greek/whatever local language materials were translated in, had access. Today, there is a lot of information that is translated into English; however, not everyone can read English, or the materials in the original language.

Let me get side-tracked to put this in relatable terms. We all know what Wikipedia is. We can’t Google something without seeing something pop up from Wikipedia. But who has access to the information from Wikipedia? In one of my master’s courses, we learned a lot about Wikipedia, and one thing I learned was that not everyone has the same access to information as everyone else. When I looked at a Wikipedia page, I would often find myself looking to see what languages that page was translated to. Sometimes very little existed to people in other languages. Other times, very little existed to English speakers (Take examples of the Ba’ja page and the Normandy page as contrasting examples of the amount of information available to people).

Getting back to the book, let me talk a moment about the benefits of access. The authors state that museums, who initially put their digitized collections behind a paywall, have found that providing access to digital information online has helped broaden the study of objects, artifacts, images, sounds, and spaces. As technology continues to improve, editing has become close to a true representation, allowing individuals who cannot physically go see the item in person, a chance to study it online. Having the ability to manipulate images allows people to view materials in ways they might not be allowed to by visiting the museum (as you typically cannot touch the artifacts 🤷).

Moving on, another thing I thought about during my reading was the costs associated with digitizing materials and storage. It costs time and money to scan texts, images, etc. It costs money to maintain the websites and the servers that hold these collections. Going forward, how will people work to keep up with the advancement of technology and these storage issues?

The book “The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars” was an interesting and thought provoking read, as you can see from my rant above. The book talked about more than just access and storage, but this is what I chose to focus on for this first posting.

I hope you have enjoyed your visit!

-The Migrant Isotopist