Visual Research Methods/Digital Humanities

I am gladly teaching my Visual Research Methods course again to a group of curious, lively grad students at CGU. As I teach this class over its few short years, it is surprising to see how quickly the students’ access to tools and general digital competence raises even as they remain equally trepidatious to their past classmates about their abilities to write online, digitally and creatively to new audience.

Similarly, the idea that Digital Humanities, which we study (and do) in the beginning of the semester, is a kooky idea whose time might just be coming (in relation to their own education to date as Humanities graduate students), presses closer and closer to their daily practices and employment opportunities, as Humanists and citizens, even as it still seems far afield and always anxiety provoking. Here’s some quick examples into their thinking about DH (done as an in-class exercise). Follow the links and you can see their “academic blogs,” a new practice for most of them that they take to like fish in water. Scroll up to their most current blog page and you’ll see their strong, varied, and literate “video essays,” as well.

By Visual Opportunity: http://visualopportunity.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/30-mins-to-blog-about-digital-humanities-in-class/

Digital Humanities (DH) is an online (digital) space for the collaborative, methodological scholarship and pedagogy of the humanities. Aesthetically Pleasing

It is defined by: “Active, participant engagement.” spekingevenifyourvoicehsakres

Digital humanities is an interdisciplinary field  that uses technology as a tool to expand different ways of knowing. Luciasori

We are collaborating with ideas, using new tools, as well as creating a new way to experience the information. The Intellectual Vegan

The act of creation is intended to be shared, to be responded to, and to move beyond the small world of one’s home campus and even the academic world itself. Elysian Musings

There’s a bridge between thinking and doing. Fruitful Thinking

Digital humanities seems to want to reconcile the rocky relationship between the human and the machine. DH appears to fight for the human, while the rest of the world has become enchanted by the machine. Buzek

More by Visual Opportunity

The digital humanities seeks to dismantle the “ivory tower” view of academia by disseminating knowledge through an open collaborative space that challenges the concept of authorship prevalent in scholarship. Danaehart

I believe that through the digital humanities, those us in academia can extend a hand to pop culture, offering a gesture of mutuality that is neither less than nor greater than, but contribute our skills in the reading of pop texts. Abdicating our ivory towers we can intervene in the political. Octopoda Gigante

The Digital Humanities is about multi-modality, about presenting a reader–I use the term loosely–with more than words … because ideas are more than words. Nom de Pluot

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