Digital Humanities as a "Bright Spot"

 In college, I took a course regarding technology and literature. It was called, "Digital Humanities." I was an English major, so the premise interested me but also intimidated me. I was an English major for a reason!

However, the professor knew that many of us would be hesitant in using technology. He gently showed us the tools and focused on what we knew already. In conjunction with this course, we took a standard English course where we read novels from the modern period. That class also focused on technology, but more in a literary context. In it's technological counterpart, we learned to take what we knew and translate it to graphs and visual maps.

In this example, we took the contents of Dracula and learned how to pull key words and phrases that connoted different things. We looked at how many times a female identifying character spoke vs. the men of the novel (spoiler alert, a whole lot less). We did this by taking a pdf of the novel and tagging the female names. They then taught us how to translate that into a csv, and showed us technological tools to create data visualization. 

If someone had told me, "create a data visual fro the novel Dracula," I would never have been able to do it. Yet, the faculty who led the course instead started from the ground up and showed us that it was not as scary. This feels like a bright spot to me because it took our strengths as English majors, and we learned how to translate it in a differnt way using technology.