“Building on a key aspect of design innovation, Digital Humanities must have, and even encourages, FAILURES.” 2012. “Humanities to Digital Humanities”, Digital_Humanities, Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, Jeffrey Schnapp
The passage talks about some of the key attributes of digital humanities such as versioning, prototyping, and failures. The humanities are being expanded as we know it because of the influx of digital tools and networks. Digital humanists are able to explore freely without being afraid to take the risk. The field encourages experimentation and constant conversations in order to make more progress and reach greater audiences.
Versioning is the idea of releasing many versions of a certain product or project with the goal of improvement with each release. This concept includes the other key attributes to the maturation of the digital humanities, prototyping and failures. Prototyping is the idea of creating new projects and introducing them to audiences. In doing so the digital humanist analyses the different results that come out of that. And failures in the context of digital humanities is a gateway towards innovation.
This passage in particular stood out to me because it emphasizes the importance of having a growth mindset within the field. This ability to be able to accept your failure and continue to try new methods and techniques leads to the expansion of what we already know about humanities.
For me personally this concept of growth mindset and acceptance of failure connected with my goals for the future. As I set up new goals, I always make sure to take into account the probability of failure. Instead of simply giving up, I use what I learned from the failure and take that knowledge to reevaluate the steps I will take towards that goal.
This term I am most eager to pursue data visualization because I am interested in seeing how digital humanists collect and put their data into a visual form. I am also interested in how a digital humanist goes about starting or planning a project and what steps they would take towards that.
