“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 examples), society views you as inferior. This perception of everybody being either a “maker” or nothing is unfair and overlooks many different kinds of careers that are also very productive. This false assumption of the binary nature of careers can also be seen in many other aspects of life and is a large problem. Hopefully, in the future, people will become aware of the fact that people are not restrained to two different types or characteristics.
In the past, I’ve seen and experienced many instances of false assumptions based on appearance. For example, one of my friends in high school was very enthusiastic about chess. Because of this, some of his peers had a false perception that he was a ‘nerd’ and not cool enough for them. This quote, along with some of my past experiences, helped me realize that I should never assume something about another person based only on appearance.
This term in Hacking the Humanities, I am most excited to create visualizations of data to help more people understand it. For example, I would like to create some type of visualization to help display the monetary trends of a company. This relates to my career goal of becoming an analyst for a company and determining the best course of action based on past monetary and other trends.
One reply on “Assignment – Teagan Johnson”
You bring up a good point in this post Teagan. It helps me check back on my own assumptions about what the Digital Humanities are and aren’t, specifically in terms of the humanities aspect. I feel like its easy to develop tunnel vision for our own disciplines and forget that there is a massive range of subjects looking to implement digital solutions and that the analytic applications of DH are just as important as ones related to history (the field I most closely associate with).