The digitization of the world’s knowledge and its movement across global networks, no matter how incomplete or incompletely free, have transformed what we understand by and how we approach the humanities in the 21st century.
Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 26.
As a Computer Science major and as an international student, this quote grabbed my attention when I was reading this book and made me to think about how education has changed in the 21st century. When I was growing up in Korea, I used to watch a lot of foreign movies to study English. At that time, I didn’t have any deep thoughts about studying English and the way of education I had, but after experiencing traditional style of educations, I realized that it was a very accessible way to study language especially as a foreigner.
Just like the movies in my childhood, I realized that there were many different approaches delivering knowledge in my life, and the key was technology that expanded the possibilities for finding or developing different means for education. One of the examples would take place in statistics course. Since last term, I have been taking statistics courses, and I believe it is one of the fields that are hugely benefited by the improvement of technology. With a computer and a software (, and our ability to write code), it is surprisingly easy to analyze the relationships of the variables, the validity of data, and even simulate an experiment. Also, it is important to note that the data visualization has become a simple task with a few lines of commands. Another example could be virtual spaces. The pandemic has changed our lifestyles and our education is one of the most affected fields. However, now we adapted with remote classes, and it has been working much better than we expected.
Like the examples I mentioned above, the current field of education, including our way of learning, is transforming and will transform quickly. In Digital Humanities class, I would like to experience new tools or learn new topics that I could apply to make a visual representation like SketchUp. Also, I personally think it would be interesting to visualize something abstract like the DH community, and I look forward to learn more about the combination of technology and humanities.
I strongly resonate with your blog post! As also an international student, resources on the internet often help a lot in terms of gaining new knowledge. And the technological advance truly helps to reduce some repetitive works we had to do before.