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 […]
“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 […]
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. […]
If I could produce commodities at the same rate I produce unnecessary words, maybe society would value me as a maker.
“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 […]
This was my first time using SketchUp, and I found it relatively simple to use. It was fun and intuitive, something that makes for a positive experience for a person with very little 3D modeling experience. The exception was that I had trouble with a few specific tools. The first trouble I ran into was […]
“A quote often attributed to Gloria Steinem says: ‘We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.’ “ I had never heard the words “digital” and “humanities” in the same sentence before registering for this class. After reading a couple of articles which […]
However, one of the strongest attributes of the field is that the iterative versioning of digital projects fosters experimentation, risk-taking, redefinition, and sometimes failure. It is important that we do not short-circuit this experimental process in the rush to normalize practices, standardize methodologies, and define evaluative metrics. Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities […]
“Rather, 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. “ Why I Am Not […]
Considering that I had no experience with modeling in Sketchup and my limited artistic experience as a youth, I found the program to be easier to use than I expected. I was extremely excited with process involved with creating my art and the satisfaction of tangibility experienced in creation. That stated, it was still annoying […]
Within this universe, the edifice of the humanities was firmly anchored in classical philology with fields such as archaeology, art history, and linguistics emerging only gradually from the shadow of textual studies. Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 6. After just two periods of my first Digital Humanities […]
“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…” Why I Am Not a Maker, Debbie Chachra This passage grabbed my attention because it was something I had never thought about. As I started to […]
a. Overall, using SketchUp was an enjoyable experience. It was a bit of a learning curve at first, but the longer I worked with it, the easier it became. b. The process of moving one individual line instead of all the parts connected to the line was very tedious. I’m still not entirely sure of […]
“The problem is the idea that the alternative to making is usually not doing nothing…” Why I Am Not a Maker, Debbie Chachra This passage grabbed my attention because it reminded me about how society can often assume false binaries. In this example, if you don’t “make” something for a living (coding and engineering are two […]
Using SketchUp for the first time was a rather challenging though rewarding experience. It reminded me of my experience of learning a new language, where I would have to adapt a sentence structure to say what I wanted but using words I knew. With SketchUp I had to try and build a structure as well […]
SketchUp initially seemed daunting. It took me some time to get adjusted to the using a trackpad and working in three dimensions. After some YouTube tutorials and a bit of practice I became more comfortable. What I found most difficult was size and proportion. I was struggling to create the correct sizes of doors and […]
How easy/hard was it? While my gut instinct is to lament about how much time it took to learn and how difficult it was to master the finicky tools, the program itself is actually incredibly beginner-friendly. Even though there’s a distinct learning curve consisting of constantly making and remaking rectangles, each tool is easily labelled, […]
At first, getting familiar with SketchUp was a challenge for me, as I have next to know experience with modeling or computers in general. However, after the tutorials and fiddling around with all of the tools for awhile, I was able to discover how I could use certain functions to piece together a rough model […]
I found the process of creating a house on SketchUp to be fairly intuitive after about half an hour of playing around with the software. I also found the tutorial video by SketchUp on roofs to be very useful. At first, I got bogged down in trying to make things look perfect. I was trying […]
Sketchme is a wonderful app to generate 3-D work, but it was a little bit challenging to me because it was the first time that I use the app like this. The unfamiliarity of the app bogged me down. The instruction videos showed how to manifest the old version of Sketchup, thus I couldn’t find […]
Utilizing SketchUp as a novice isn’t difficult. However, to plan for and actually have the program execute the exact steps and shapes you want is a whole different matter. There are many trivial intricacies that can completely change the final look of one’s build. For instance, being in scale with the actual build in terms […]
How easy/hard was it? I found some elements of SketchUp to be easy and some elements to be more difficult. The initial rotation and movement was not intuitive but it felt more natural after a little bit of practice. I mainly worked with the rectangle, push up, and move tools, which generally acted as I […]
Designing my childhood home from memory was perhaps one of the more difficult tasks given to me this term. Despite the formative years in my home, the summers that seemed to drag on for eternity and the winters that tested my youthful resolve, the image, the memory of my home itself, seemed to elude me. […]
