Reflection on Semester

The class ‘research in digital humanities’ during this past semester was interesting to say the least. In this post I will talk about the things I thought were good and bad about this class and also how it influenced the way I do or see the world around me. In the next couple of paragraphs I will talk about what my personal opinion is of this class. Just remember that this might differ from other people their opinion as well as what ‘the average student’ thinks.

First I will talk about the positive side of this class and what I thought to be really useful. One of the most useful things learned in class is that I learned how to code in python. Programming wasn’t unknown to me however Python was. This class made us learn how to use it and how it allows us to gather data, analyze data and it’s usefulness for digital humanities. This class also taught me how to work together with multiple students without the guidance of a teacher. Every new lab that we had to do in class, the teacher gave us more responsibility and a wider topic so that we would have by every lab, we had some choices to make. These choices then would influence the entire class since we would work together on a common topic. This made me and all other students feel more free but also more responsible, in other words, we got good opportunities to become more independent, improved my problem solving skills and improve our communication skills. The final great advantage this class has is that every week or 2 weeks we had to write a medium story. Writing this short but concise post greatly improved our writing skills.

Now, the negative points about this class will be mentioned also. One of the more negative points for me would be considered the readings we got in the first half of this semester. I do agree that the first one about ‘what is digital humanities’ and ‘what does data mean’ were meaningful in order to give us an idea of what we are doing and what will be expected of us. However other readings, especially the ones a bit later in the semester, didn’t get discuss all that much and much of the content didn’t really sink in all to well. So in order to improve that, next semester assign less readings in order to make sure that the latest readings will get discussed better.

Finally, I will mention how this class help me see things around me differently and the reasons why I would take a class like this. I think this class is very useful to make you understand what (digital) humanities are, what humanist do and what compensates humanities. It will make you look at humanities as a subject that is using data (definition isn’t fixed) to learn about (digital) culture. In other words, it is about everything, it will make see humanities as a bridge between every field and every study conducted so far. If anything I just mentioned sounds interesting to you, then you should give the class ‘digital humanities’ a try and see for yourself if you like it or not. One thing is for sure when trying this class, you won’t lose anything by trying, you can only gain.

So in the end, I would say that if you want a class that helps you develop multiple skills and you’re not afraid to do project without continuous guidance of your teacher this is certainly the class you want to try out. The good things in this class outweighs the ‘less’ interesting parts. This class is most definitely a great class if you want to be exposed to a lot of digital tools (like Python, word clouds, …) in order to make the final project in that class work. The final project is what will show the teacher what you have learned from that class and how to apply it. All of this is very fun and will improve your overall skills (communication, writing, reading, …) as well as your ability to understand what humanists do.