When Ian Bogost talked about that one Georgia student going for a PHD in history, it came off to me as very negative. I think before or after telling her story, he emphasized how everything is a risk, even graduate school. He explained the risk of going to graduate was the equivalent to becoming a famous athlete. The reward and loss are both extremely high. To my millennial worldview where graduate school doesn’t sound crazy (even a logical, possible next step), he sounded very cynnical on the idea of graduate school.
Defining Digital Humanities
History, linguistics, art, and many more current and past subjects make up the humanities. Today, digital for the most part means information processed by computers. So it’s natural to think that digital humanities means these humanist subjects processed and shared on the Web. However, the first chapter of Digital_Humanities by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, Jeffrey Schnapp seems to look beyond the advancement of the computer and its features. They define digital humanities as very different humanist subjects (history, linguistics, etc.) and being able to communicate those subjects to a wide variety of audiences. Therefore, digital humanities is connecting and sharing these distant subjects to as big an audience as you can. This process happened through history as articulated in the chapter and the modern computer is just one tool a digital humanist can use to achieve this goal of communicating and drawing their own interpretations.