It was my birthday last weekend. I spent the last few days googling the “perfect” spots for a meal and activities and caught myself feeling nostalgic and sentimental about my relationship with technology...

In Rosenbloom’s (2012) article, he presents that there are four ‘great scientific’ domains: Physical, Life, Social, and Computing. Humanities is a subdomain of the Social, which positions Digital Humanities in the Social and Computing domains. The article suggests that the humanities fit within the sciences as part of an expanded social domain.

I reflect upon my own experiences with Digital Humanities:

i.Early Years: Internet became the Gateway to connect with like-minded peers

The first computer I was exposed to was a DOS-operated IBM machine that my father had used solely for work. My brother, sister and I mainly used it to “practice” our typing since we could not get past the blinking green line on the top left of the screen. Due to its lack of features (from a child’s perspective), we quickly got tired and moved on to play with toys and board games.

Fast forward to a couple of years later, my father bought the family a communal computer that connected to the internet with a dial-up modem. I still remember that shrill, high-pitched static tone and watching the computer icon on the screen as it displayed the attempts to connect. Once my siblings and I had access to online chess, Neopets, as well as mutlplayer games on the Internet, the computer chair became more worn than the area in front of the television.

Leiner et al. (1997) stated that “…the internet is as much a collection of communities as a collection of technologies, and its success is largely attributable to both satisfying basic community needs as well as effectively utilizing the community to push the infrastructure forward…”. The ability to connect with others had satisfied a need to belong with a community, which started our continual use of the computer to access the Internet.

ii.Professional Years

a. Social Media Marketer

I took on a social media marketer role, using Google Analytics to mine information about the target market and Google Adwords to develop Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaigns.

I gained a better understanding of Google as a business in this position. Companies would battle for the top spot on the search results page, and to remain at the top, they had to stay relevant to their demographic’s search interests.  Leiner et al. noted that “…the Internet has now become almost a “commodity” service, and much of the latest attention has been on the use of this global information infrastructure for support of other commercial services” (p. 16).  The mixture of information from hashtags, trending topics, and consumer data is valuable to enterprises that utilize the data to sell more of their products to the right market.

The challenging part of maintaining digital marketing campaigns was keeping up with what was trending. Although Google provided a wide range of data, marketers had to stay vigilant by joining external forums and offline conversations to discover the next trend wave or risk being irrelevant. Castells (2000) mentioned that:

“Social change, happen primarily through two mechanisms, both external to dominant networks: 1) denial of the networking logic through the affirmation of values that cannot be processed in any network, only obeyed, and follow (cultural communes), not necessarily linked to fundamentalism, but which are always centred through their self-contained meaning. 2) Alternative networks – built around alternative projects…” (p. 22) 

b. Business Analyst (Artificial Intelligence Industry)

In this role, I collected datasets and captured process flow from company clients, which would be used by our technical team (Data Scientist and Developers) to automate and optimize their processes. In this function, I felt I gained a new perspective (Computational thinking), which according to Berry & Fagerjord (2017) is defined as “deploying the principles from computer programming and computer science in problem spaces” or more simply, an “automation of our abstractions”.

Berry & Fagerjord (2017) further mention that this mode of thinking will “completely transform how one thinks about knowledge and argument”. From capturing data workflows and translating

them into requirements, I started thinking in programming logic such as IF, OR, AND, and NOT, which leads to the next decision until the job is completed. This has changed how I view knowledge – I try to define an end goal and must be able to duplicate end results from required inputs. Being “creative” was allowed for programming solutions (technology stacks and code), but development cannot be started unless one could capture the flow on which to base the program. 

Our company used the term “big data” when describing the datasets that we process, which includes the company data, as well as other statistical data from open-source websites. The “predictive” functionality is what a lot of companies are after, although one should be skeptical about the results. It seems that the “prediction” should be utilized as a warning for what could happen, and even if accuracy is not up to par, then as per Lanier (2014), “…people adapt to the presence of information systems, whether the adaptation is conscious or not, and whether the information system functioning as expected or not”.

iii.Moving Forward: The next Five Years

Going forward, I think that Digital Humanities and its frameworks will be applicable to our network society for decades to come. As Berry & Fagerjord have mentioned, “…we tend to model our understanding of the human mind on the computers and algorithms we have created”. As we advance and push for discovery in the four scientific domains (Physical, Life, Social, and Computing), the need for Digital Humanities will only grow to explore the connections of how technology is experienced or adds to the experiences of society.

REFERENCES

Berry, D., & Fagerjord, A. (2017). On the way to computational thinking . In Digital humanities: Knowledge and critique in a digital age.Malden, MA: Polity.

Castells, M. (2000).Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society.  British Journal of Sociology 51(1), 5–24.

Lanier, J. (2014). From above: Misusing big data to become ridiculous . In Who owns the future?Simon & Schuster.

Leiner, B., Vinton, G., Cerf, D., Clark, R., Kahn, Kleinrock, L., Lynch, D., Postel, J., Roberts, L., Wolff, S. (1997). Brief history of the Internet . Internet Society.

Rosenbloom, P. (2016). Toward a conceptual framework for the digital humanities . In M. Terrass, J. Nyhan, and E. Vanhoutte (Eds.), Defining digital humanities: A reader (pp. 219–236). Burlington, VT: Ashgate.