The iterative nature of the Digital Humanities is what makes this a once-in-a-generation moment to reinvigorate the idea of a core curriculum for undergraduates: to make them active participants and stakeholders in the creation and preservation of cultural materials.
Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 3.
This quote quickly caught my attention because does not treat students as passive recipients of knowledge, but as creators and preservers of cultural legacy. Such an assumed description of students resonates me well because I believe we students do not simply study for the grades in the exams but for the future of human civilization: we learn knowledge, leverage knowledge to create something new, and preserve the cultural materials we created by Digital Humanities. And cultural materials matter, because they are the key things to differentiate humans and normal animals, by showing there are much more things we care about other than surviving and reproduction.
This quote reminds me of my experience in the course of statistical consulting last term. In that course, we employ our statistical knowledge to help the local communities: help the local Northfield schools to determine what affects students’ grades, or collect and summarize Carleton community’s political opinion on endowment policy… During the process, we received the digital copy of reports from previous students in this project, where we can learn what the result they obtained four years ago, and what remains to be filled. With the help of the preservation, we could better locate the starting point of our current project and what the next step should be taken. Back to the quote above, I think this quote does a great job summarizing and reflecting what we were doing in that course by referring to Digital Humanities: we learn to create and preserve for the good of the next generation, for the good of the community, for the good of the society.
I am most eager to pursue 3D modeling. Because 3D modeling gives us an opportunity to experiment with an object design with no cost. Something that is hard to be crafted by hand can be easily modeled digitally, which makes it much easier to innovate and we do not need to worry about failures for no serious consequences. I cannot wait to see objects that I’ve never encountered in the real world, even though they do not make sense!
