I used to use SketchUp in middle school – and I struggled. Back then, I couldn’t make anything like this. I remember feeling very overwhelmed. Now, it’s different. I am so excited by the prospects of creating and solving issues through using this application. Through the process of visualizing and building the house, I felt […]
Six Degrees of Francis Bacon Six Degrees of Francis Bacon is a hilarious project documenting the degrees of separation between the famed philosopher and other people. According to their blog (https://6dfb.tumblr.com/), the data for this site is collected by “anyone with an interest in early modern studies, digital humanities, design, interactive network visualization, history and […]
Today I explored Virtual Angkor, a website built in order to show off a complete digital 3d model of the historical city of Angkor Wat in the Khmer Empire in what is now Cambodia. The website has a focus on dynamic videos and interactivity, in order to best show the 3d space of the model. […]
Virtual Angkor is a groundbreaking collaboration between Virtual History Specialists, Archaeologists and Historians designed to bring the Cambodian metropolis of Angkor to life. Tom Chandler, Adam Clulow, Bernard Keo, Mike Yeates and Martin Polkinghorne, “Virtual Angkor”, 2018, virtualangkor.com.Posner, Miriam. “How Did They Make That?” Designed primarily as an educational tool to transport students into a […]
Virtual Angkor is a groundbreaking collaboration between Virtual History Specialists, Archaeologists and Historians designed to bring the Cambodian metropolis of Angkor to life. Built for the classroom, it has been created to take students into a 3D world and to use this simulation to ask questions about Angkor’s place in larger networks of trade and […]
The Rhythm of Food is an interactive website that sheds light on the many facets of food seasonality, as seen through the lens of search interest in the United States over the last 15 years. -Rhythm of Food team Sources: The creators of The Rhythm of Food used data from Google Trends to figure out […]
Authorial London is a project that maps references to places in and around London that either have biographical or literary connections to authors. It is run by Stanford University and was originally led by Professor Martin Evans, but is currently maintained by members of the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research as well as others associated […]
[People nowadays believe that] work that needed to be done day after day was meaningless, and that only creating new things was a worthwhile endeavor. Debbie Chachra, “Why I Am Not a Maker,” The Atlantic, January 23, 2015. Another Ctrl + Enter. It was the hundredth time I ran the same code snippet. And it was […]
Almost all the artifacts that we value as a society were made by or at the order of men. But behind every one is an invisible infrastructure of labor- primarily caregiving, in its various aspects- that is mostly performed by women. Debbie Chachra. “Why I Am Not a Maker,” (Washington, D.C.: The Atlantic, January 2015), […]
By the mid-20th century, the modern research university assumed its present form, with segmented humanities departments separated from the natural and social sciences as well as from vocational and professional schools. Digital work challenges many of these separations, promoting dialogue not only across established disciplinary lines but also across the pure/applied, qualitative/quantitative, and theoretical/practical divides. […]
“…I want to see us recognize the work of the educators, those that analyze and characterize and critique, everyone who fixes things, all the other people who do valuable work with and for others—above all, the caregivers—whose work isn’t about something you can put in a box and sell.” Debbie Chachra, “Why I Am Not […]
‘We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.’ Chachra, D. (2020). Why I Am Not a Maker. [online] The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/why-i-am-not-a-maker/384767/ [Accessed 14 Jan. This quote came at the end of the article and was intended to reiterate the […]
There is a need to address the complexities of globalization, colonization, and the alienated labor of people of color in the production of technology that advances digital scholarship practices that they will not be able to access or directly benefit from. Moya Z. Bailey, All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but […]
The form that knowledge takes in digital environments and the arguments it expresses in its information structures can be deeply infused with humanistic values, but only if humanists are involved. Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 19. For me, this quote gets at the inherent conversation between the […]
“Along with many other scholars, we suggest that the migration of cultural materials into digital media is a process analogous to the flowering of Renaissance and post-Renaissance print culture.” Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 1-26. This quotation is both obvious and worth taking a moment to reflect […]
Making is not a rebel movement, scrappy individuals going up against the system. Chachra, Debbie. “Why I Am Not a Maker.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 23 Jan. 2015. My attention was attracted by this quote because it made a statement that, upon first read, I did not agree with. I have always felt that creativity […]
A Difficult Introduction to SketchUP 3D Looking back on my first experience with SketchUP, the only thing that I can think about to really describe the experience would be frustration. A lot of it. I began by attempting to utilize the web version of the application on my laptop, only to discover that it was […]
“The cultural primacy of making, especially in tech culture—that it is intrinsically superior to not-making, to repair, analysis, and especially caregiving—is informed by the gendered history of who made things, and in particular, who made things that were shared with the world, not merely for hearth and home.” Debbie Chachra, Why I Am Not a Maker (The Atlantic, […]
“What is less-often noted is that computational methods have been altered in significant ways by humanist approaches. Indeed, this is a challenge for the development of the Digital Humanities, namely the ways in which ambiguity, interpretation, contingency, positionality, and differential approaches can be embodied in computation.” Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, […]
“I want to see us recognize the work of educators, those that analyze and characterize and critique, everyone who fixes things, all the other people who do valuable work with and for others…whose work isn’t about something you can put in a box and sell.” Debbie Chachra, Why I Am Not a Maker (The Atlantic, […]
I’m always uncomfortable with it. I’m uncomfortable with any culture that encourages you take on an entire identity, rather than to express a facet of your own identity (“maker,” rather than “someone who makes things”). But I have much deeper concerns. An identity built around making things—of being “a maker”—pervades technology culture. There’s a widespread […]
It differs from traditional scholarly publication in being team-based, distributed in its production and outcome, dependent on networked resources (technical and/or administrative), and in being iterative and ongoing, rather than fixed or final, in its outcome. Burdick et al. “Project- Based Scholarship,” in Digital_Humanities(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 130. As a skeptical student hailing from […]
How easy/hard was it? The entire project felt like it should have been simple: drawing basic rectangles and triangles. Putting different dimensions in and working on different planes made it so much harder! The project wasn’t necessarily impossible to do, it just mostly took some time to figure out how to create something to match […]
There is a need to address the complexities of globalization, colonization, and the alienated labor of people of color in the production of technology that advances digital scholarship practices that they will not be able to access or directly benefit from. Bailey, Moya Z. “All The Digital Humanists Are White, All The Nerds Are Men, […]
Making is not a rebel movement, scrappy individuals going up against the system. While the shift might be from the corporate to the individual (supported, mind, by a different set of companies selling a different set of things), it mostly re-inscribes familiar values, in slightly different form: that artifacts are important, and people are not. […]
The cultural primacy of making, especially in tech culture—that it is intrinsically superior to not-making, to repair, analysis, and especially caregiving—is informed by the gendered history of who made things, and in particular, who made things that were shared with the world, not merely for hearth and home. Debbie Chachra, Why I Am Not a Maker […]
Along with many other scholars, we suggest that the migration of cultural materials into digital media is a process analogous to the flowering of Renaissance and post-Renaissance print culture. Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 4. In the early chapters of Burdick’s book, when the […]
If I could produce commodities at the same rate I produce unnecessary words, maybe society would value me as a maker.
How easy/hard was it? Making my house in SketchUp was easier than I initially thought it would be. The tutorial videos really helped me understand the SketchUp software. What elements particularly bogged you down? The only challenge I faced was trying to make the roof. Since the roof goes both directions (North to South and […]
“Digital work takes place in the real world, and humanists once accustomed to isolated or individualized modes of production must now grapple with complex partnerships and with insuring the long-term availability and viability of their scholarship.” Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 21. This passage grasped my attention […]
