As I sit here with my morning coffee and a bowl full of grapes I still go back to consider the true definition of Digital Humanities, I like when things have structure to them and are set in stone this is the opposite. This definition is written in sand that gets washed away by the waves every few minutes, it is ever changing but that's not a bad thing. Week one of class was spent trying to define what we thought digital humanities was and I can bet not one student had a wrong answer. An article assigned for us to read "Getting started in Digital Humanities by Lisa Spiro" describes a lot of how I was feeling about my Intro course to digital humanities. She says how some weren't sure how to get started and where to go for support and training. I came to the conclusion in my answer one for the midterm how informal the training seems to be, most individuals in this field just seem to dive into their work because it's something they're passionate about. They have the ability to create new things and once they determine what their goal is the possibilities of how they get there are endless. Some creators can make electronic literature or even robotic poetics in the essay by William Winder, he explains the link between generated text, language and robots. The outlook on the field from different digital humanists contains networks of people who constantly work together, share research, and collaborate on projects for sometimes years. You definitely have to be a team player in this field, yes there is work you can do independently, but learning and creating with one another is a huge key factor in the field. Sharing different computer codes so others can create more off of it is just the norm, Nick Montfort who created "Taroko Gorge" openly posted the program he wrote so other people in the field or just people who wanted to try it out could create new things. Which Sonny Rae Tempest took full advantage of and created "Camel Tail", he input Metallica lyrics to generate four lines of text which discovered different rhythms, logic and themes in their lyrics. Another way of creating this is through archival work, The Bahian History Project is a source for analyzing nineteenth-century Brazilian social history through the 1830's regional manuscript censuses. Work like this is very time consuming, but is made for the greater good because it helps earlier generations see what happened to their family. The goal for the creation of this piece was to encourage the re-examinations of Brazilian slavery among students and scholars. This is a piece of history that people should have access to and become educated about.
The examples above are just a few examples of different things one can do in the field of digital humanities, some can be fun interactive pieces and others are more serious and meant for educational purposes. Defining the digital humanities is done by so many scholars, but they're such a diverse group of people which gives the field its broad definition.
