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As a postgraduate student of Digital Cultures at University College Cork, the assessment of the modules was based on different types of projects which mainly were: group project – individual presentation – reflective writing on the different topics discussed in the module.
So, this is the work I have done for the module of Conceptual Introduction into Digital Arts and Humanities:
The group project was a website designed on Adobe Xd and exported as html:
https://digitalartefact.raghdamawlana.org/
We liked the idea of the Digital Age Motto that “No one is left behind.” We liked the argument of “One size fits all.”
Moreover, we wanted to teach the young aged people that technology can be used in a good way to develop ourselves and the world around us, because most of teenagers are influenced by the people they see on Instagram and YouTube, social media platforms generally. We wanted to let them know that technology was already used in customization of different things, and it is developing every day and we can take great advantage of it.
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Digitization vs Digitalization:
We have information, we put it on some digital source. So, we convert analogue to digital. That is Digitization.
If we add more information digitally, it is improving and becoming more useful in the digital world. This is Digitalization. However, both digitization and digitalization are considered as part of the digital transformation.
As we are getting more into the digital world, and more and more people can easily travel and visit places, we should be aware of the damage that may affect the monuments and cultural sites when mass tourism happen. We must protect our heritage for the future generations. We can digitize and digitalize the information we already have so more people can visit our museums online and that also can help us to save our information to pass it on for next generations as well. Infinite archives, I guess.
We also should consider the idea of FAIR data when putting online content. The content must be written in a format that somehow should be accessible, sustainable, findable.
While sharing information of our culture and heritage online, we need people to engage with it in a safe, protected way so the material itself should be secured.
Cultures include people, we should include the people whenever we are talking about a culture or making decisions. ‘If it is about us, it should include us.’
Technology is developing, materials are evolving, and new thoughts are rising. Therefore, art galleries should be dynamic.
Everyone has his own experience; we cannot draw the same shape in an identical way and of course our paintings won’t be similar. Whoever studied fine-arts or something related can be aware of that. We used to practice using art materials by drawing sculptures or shapes infront of us and we had degrees on that. Everyone got extremely different styles of art and definitely, different degrees.
Somehow Egypt is an open museum, while attending Fine Arts, I enrolled into Drawing course which gave me the opportunity to visit many historical places and draw and paint and even try new art materials outside of college. I remember sitting on the ground of Museum of Islamic Art and sketching an ancient item that was made of marble, as well as drawing in the streets of Old Cairo. Walking and exploring those old streets perhaps was a magnificent experience.
One of my all-time favorite art galleries that I’ve ever visited is an art gallery that was held at my college in 2019, and it was an exhibition of one of the teaching assistants there, His name is Marwan Sabra and his paintings reflected what I went through and how I felt in that specific period of time. His art touched me deeply and he is one of my favorite artists.
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Gender, Race and Digital Cultures
Algorithmic Opression:
-There is a book called Algorithms of Oppression was written by Safiya Umoja. It is a text base of six years of academic research on Google search algorithms. She examined search results from 2009 to 2015. The book’s approach is about the relationship between search engines and discriminatory biases. This book argues that algorithms perpetuate oppression and discriminate against people of color. Ex. If you write ‘black’ in the search engine, the first thing you will probably see is “black girls”, which not only discriminate about the color, but women too.
Navigating the Global Digital Humanities,
“Your Digital Humanities is not my Digital Humanities. And that is a good thing.” -Padmini Ray Murray
I always find people don’t really get the idea that we are different and we should respect each other. Everyone went through different situations, different things that made him the person he is right now. Not to mention that people come from different cultures and they have different backgrounds which lead to having different mentalities. And it is a must to respect each other’s difference. What is the idea of all of us being the same?
Literary scholars were accused of brainwashing young minds.
I think people know how art with all of its types can affect us. Art is a main thing in building culture. I think if you want to know more about a certain culture, we may look at their art whether their paintings or their music or their poetry to get an idea of who are they.
‘Not all communities want their cultural heritage digitized.’
I am not getting the idea of that. We are already living in the digital era. I think we need the future generations to be able to access our cultural heritage, therefore, we should take advantage of the technology and how we can save and deliver our culture for the next generations. Virtual reality is here and we can visit other countries from our place!
However, if we need to see a specific painting or visit a gallery, if we want to visit a historical place, I think it is so easy and better because we can do that without damaging the actual monuments and they will be there for the future generations as well.
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DH as Method | Theory | Practice
The Humanities, done digitally:
Digital Humanities are plural as I believe they include the digital form of great different aspects. They are the same as the traditional humanities but what differs is: they are in a digital form.
-“DH shouldn’t be only about the production of knowledge, it’s about challenging the ways that knowledge is represented and shared.” -I think Humanities are the same, traditionally or digitally, they just differ in the methods they are shared and represented. Both of them has its advantages and disadvantages of course.
Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship:
“Humanistic theory provides ways of thinking differently.” -Digital Humanists provide us with different thoughts and those thoughts are shared digitally, therefore, digital humanists create the way of thinking and provide the culture with new thoughts using the new digital methods. Humanities content met digital methods and created projects within the technological dominance. However, humanistic thinking encourages us to think more from the perspective of our disciplines. Humanistic thinking focuses on each individual’s potential. It approaches the personal worth of the individual and the value of each human. Moreover, Digital Humanities can be the intersection of digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities.
However, I read different topics about Digital Humanities and I found this link that I think might be helpful:
https://georgiasouthern.libguides.com/c.php?g=776356&p=5726309
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The Digital Turn in Culture
Hitchcock:
The resources we use have become digital so the history we create has itself been turned into digital from notes to bibliographies, submitted drafts and reports.
Using search engines such as google; the more general the search, the greater the variance is likely to be between the number of hits claimed and the actual number of links.
Metadata is the information about a text or work or a webpage.
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From the Internet to the WWW
Tim Berners-Lee,
The inventor of the World Wide Web and one of Time Magazine’s ‘100 Most Important People of the 20th Century’. Moreover, he is the director of the World Wide Web foundation which seeks to ensure the web serves humanity by establishing it as a global public good and a basic right. He also wrote books about the web. He had written the three fundamental technologies that remain the foundation of today’s web:
HTML: HyperText Markup Language. The language for the web.
URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. It is used to identify to each resource on the web.
HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
The OPTE Project:
It is a visualization of the development of the internet.
‘The internet is the largest engineering project the earth has ever seen. And we are just getting started.’
ARPANET: The internet was supposed to share knowledge that would positively affect humans. It is should have more worth than sharing photographs of unimportant things.
Submarinecablemap.com: It is very interesting. And yes, it is always updated which makes it even more interesting. It is the new map of the internet, isn’t it?
Web 2.0 and search engines:
Search engines don’t update like the applications or softwares because they are constantly updating.
Thanks to web 2.0 because now we always have our data on the cloud. We don’t lose our information anymore. We can get new phones and upload our data on it easily.
Social media only works because most people contribute.
Everyone is participating. That is the internet now.
A domain of one’s own:
“A domain of your own is the root of your personal cloud.”
I agree with Gardner Campbell in his argument that ‘learning to build and to operate a personal cloud is a life skill students would need and should be taught.’
I think everyone should have his own digital presence that actually represents him and his personality and character since we live in the digital world and it is always developing. I believe our digital presence is a crucial thing now and we should work on it.
Picking a domain name is the first step. I figured that out while picking my first domain name in the practical session with Dr.Patrick Egan at UCC.
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Scholarship and Culture
My intradiscipline is Fine Arts. However, I’m in this scholarship learning about Digital Cultures with other people so this could be multidscipline.
For the crossdiscipline, I might look at interior design from my graphic art perspective or point-of-view.
Interdiscipline, having my graphic-art background and getting knowledge about branding and visual identities.
Transdiscipline, I think it is what is beyond the multidisciplines, where we can connect our knowledge together.
By those disciplines, I can tell that my primary discipline is Fine Arts. My secondary discipline is Graphic Design. My tertiary discipline is Painting and Illustration.
Challenging approach. Yes sure, it is. I still feel overwhelmed. But somehow I feel like I am in the place that I should be, searching and getting new information about topics and things that I am finding out that those are my interests. Even though I am still uncertain and I am not sure of the outcomes yet.
One thing I am sure of is that it is worth it.
Reimagining scholarship and culture:
Internet is a main thing now. Everybody can use it, it is not an exclusive thing. Everyone can participate. However, that may lead to many advantages and disadvantages. Also, it affects the humanities which probably affects the culture.
Affecting the culture pattern. Some people create. Some people consume. And that is the cultural pattern.
Internet has brought to us many opportunities as well as giving us a great access to many information. In addition to engaging with each other instantly despite of distance. I’ve found out that Digital Cultures have many characteristics, that couldn’t be available without the internet, such as:
1-Digital Literacy: The use of new information and communication media to reform information.
2-Premanence: Everything we do in the digital world leaves a trace.
3-Copiability: Digital information and products are easily copied.
4-Instantaneousness: Instantly sending and receiving information.
5-Interconnectivity: Constant access to information.
6-Identity: Digitally remixed cultures are used to enact identity.
7-Multitasking: Several tasks and managed at the same time.
Infrastucture for history and culture:
I’ve read Big-Tent Digital Humanities by Pannapacker, Liu 2011 and went through Envisioning the Digital Humanities (Svensson 2012),
Digital humanists create the new infrastructure of our history and culture.
A revolution! DH students collaborate and do researches that matter and have an impact on the societies, that is important and that of course matter more than getting a degree and passing the exam and forgetting about it since higher education has been seen as a private rather than a public good.
William Pannapacker called digital humanities “The next big thing.” And I think yes. It is.
Liu discusses the humanities computing or text-based digital humanities and new media studies.
Digital devices that we have now and that the universities hand out to students would’ve been fantasy machines before the can be proven to be learning machines.
“Digital humanities provide smarter tools for working while trimming the need to invest in the traditional facilities or support staff.” From Liu’s. – My opinion is that is not the effect of Digital Humanities itself but the effect of the technology and the constant development we have every hour. The effect of technology on replacing the old methods with the new ones which leads to forgetting the old. Just like how we still can get information from books that have been there from 100 years ago but we can not get information from devices that were available 30 years ago. One of the disadvantages of technology I guess.
And surely those characteristics may help people in a positive way but there are some disadvantages of the internet as well, such as bullying, cyber bullying and social tension.
Are Digital Humanities visionary?
I thought about that. I see the Digital Humanities are the digital tools and the technology added to humanities disciplines. Digital Humanities are visionary. They are forward-looking as there are always discussions towards the future. Digital Humanities make it possible for us to access greater amount of data online.