This is simply disgusting. Simply searching “white man comes up with very different results. Articles about their privilege, and how they are feeling left out diversity and inclusion- here’s one of the first articles to pop up https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresahopke/2022/03/30/white-men-are-feeling-left-out-of-dei-diversity-equity--inclusion-why-should-we-care-and-what-should-we-do/?sh=411b2f3ffaa6. Women of colour are often seen as “exotic” and fun, and this article gives some great insight into the topic for anyone interested https://clubsexu.com/en/racial-fetishization-colour-as-fantasy/.

Well isn't this an interesting idea. Of course, there has to be some social or monetary profit associated. You have always got to have a good story because creating 'marketable' content for the masses is what really matters.

This is so true. It is so easy to become reliant on something and then come to trust it simply because it feels familiar.

This is so cool! I love these types of creative commentaries to raise awareness and get people to assess their own assumptions.

I cannot say that I am totally surprised. It is truly shocking the conversations I have overheard while at UNBC. Sometimes students are speaking "jokingly" but the subjects are not funny. Other times I have been sitting in the cafeteria and overheard loud homophobic and transphobic conversations. I have heard too many stories of guys going too far, or even just making offensive or threatening comments about women. And so often I see women just going along with what is said. This many be for any number of reasons, but internalized misogyny is one of them. I hope that my generation is getting better about ideas of equality, equity, acceptance, and general human decency, but there are still so many people who seem incapable of imagining an experience outside their own privileged bubble of narrow-minded existence.

Yeah. If these are the types of auto-complete suggestions that search engines are recommending, then how else are search engines filtering or influencing results?

"women should not... wear that which pertaineth to a man" was my auto-complete suggestion.

It is very upsetting to see the same problematic suggestions for auto-completion coming up on all my browsers. I asked my friends to check the auto-complete on different browsers. Three of the five tested had problematic auto-fill suggestions why one had non-problematic suggestions and another had no suggestions.

Wow, I just typed in a couple variations of "why are black women so" and "why are women so" in my browser and the auto complete suggestions NOT good. Very disturbing.

The foundation of digital humanities seems to be around theoretical work in that it's not necessarily real life, but based on theory and ideas.

From my understanding, academia is thoroughly interested in the understanding of DH its progressiveness. Although their are concerns, in terms of cultural aspects, there are processes that can support that ingoing collaboration and work that can work alongside the DH work.

Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism or other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good. – American Humanist Association

Humanists is based on a combination of theory and beliefs and paves the way to live through life to be better a better person.

Reference: https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/definition-of-humanism/

This line reminded me of something a friend told me recently. The last few generations of humans will be the first generations that will have living memories (Videos and audio) of them living their lives. To think that in several hundred years, someones great great great great grandchild may be able to pull up a video of us today and say to their grandchildren that this is how we used to be/look/interact with our world is immensely interesting in my opinion. We don't have videos of what life was like in the 1500's. We do have paintings and records and thus can fill in the blanks with our imaginations, but future generations won't have to employ that technique nearly as much as we do.

It's important to have this kind of self-reflection as a discipline and as a person/ scholar. It seems this is what a lot of this critique of DH is getting at; it can be a discipline that radically changes the way academic work is done while also needing to improve it's own inclusivity and self-awareness.

Queer Technology such as "gay bombs" are the manifesto of "how to" of the queer networked activism.

When I originally heard of it, I was very perplexed at what this meant and how it was used. As the idea of a "Gay Bomb" seemed very out of the box and almost random but after watching the attached links videos and reading more about it on other articles. The concept of the "spin" began to make more and more sense.

As mentioned in the below paragraph: "This sarcastic PR spin calls into question the Apple products and slick gadgetry on which media-inclined academics depend; indeed, Queer Technologies asks us to consider not only the ends to which we apply our digital tools, but also the troubling legacies and potential applications of cutting-edge developments in science and technology."

This is an interesting perspective of the digital humanities field. Is this not true with all field though? Before biology was a field, people still investigated evolution, and biological concepts. I would argue that just because there is a name for a field of study, it does not devalue the work of people who were already doing it or do not classify as being in that field.

One shouldn't be afraid of change because something beautiful could come from it. Sure, no one wants a bug or virus in your system, but how else will you push the limits of your system and grow from it?

As expansive as a place as the internet is, inclusivity should have been mandatory from the beginning. There shouldn't be exclusion and shaming of other groups that don't align with your own.

Digital humanities have something that very few practices have had the fortune to enjoy in their early years. It can pull from every culture and country on the planet to help shape its identity and form.

It's interesting to think on how much we have covered over the semester as well as how much we have been engaging with digital humanities without realizing it. If you had asked me prior to the start of the semester to define digital humanities, I would have no idea what the subject entailed in the slightest. Now, I feel as if I have a grasp on the subject, yet there is still so much to learn and understand as the field itself is vast.

It's important to note the popularization of Big Data being visualized across disciplines, all subjects are moving towards digital methods to generate understandings of past work and future movements. Art specifically is moving into a digital understanding with integrated design becoming digitized, paving a new way to think, AI has also become a new approach in digitizing humanities

It's interesting that this article views digital humanities as a vessel for educating the public on how the digital world works and further asks what its ethical duties to society are.

As mentioned in this chapters passages as well as this link of Kathleen Fitzpatrick. The idea of DH is constantly evolving, slowly changing and adapting to new ideas. This also means that we must stay up to date with new definitions of said words/phrases.

It is clear as to why there is tension between those established earlier in the field compared to those that are new. Such as the case with many things, change is "scary" to some as it begins to form different ideas and sometimes destroy old ones. But this change displays that DH is flourishing and is headed in the right direction.

"A wise man changes his mind, a fool never will." - Icelandic Proverb

More digital data means more information easily accessible which results in more power. Everything is moving towards more of a digital world, everyone is feeling the political and economic pressure but also seeing the downfalls of this.

I love the idea of critical digital humanities interdisciplinary approach! Anything involving critical theory and interdisciplinary approach to humanities is something that is important and makes for good research/good work.

What is the politics behind digital hummanities? Would something like the controversy around how politicians use twitter/social media to campaign be considered the politics of it? Or the use of digital tools in any political aspect?

I would say, until this class I was pretty digital 'illiterate'. I was unable to do many things besides the basics when it came to the digital world. Learning how to create a website, make a digital timeline and even a digital map has opened my eyes to what is available at our finger tips. I know that I have also barely scratched the surface! Using digital tools to conduct research and gain data is such a skillset to have.

This is a very interesting way of looking at Digital Humanities as it brings along a different mindset that usually is not commonly done.

CDH seems to have a lot of flexibility in its uses and can enable a lot of collaborative efforts on many situations such as Social Justice, Questioning of Power, and overall critical theories in DH research!

This method of prioritizing "ideas" such as feminism, queer/trans/non-binary work, etc... as its model core very much aligns with how the world today is headed. And can be considered a direct reason as to why CDH is emerging now compared to previous years.

I remember someone in my friend circle mentioning a CDH initiative earlier last year at the University of Toronto which at the time I didn't know what they meant but after reading these passages, have a much greater understanding of the matter.

I think in general, most academia suffers from this kind of gatekeeping. It seems though that we are conscience of it now, as you see initiatives like women in stem happen. Opening a discipline up to diversity inevitably results in different forms of work and critical approaches.

I like this elaboration about the slow down of critiquing. In general, critiquing does take time, and it does slow down the process, however, the end result (if done correctly) is better and worth the wait.

I think this a really neat quote. What I gather from it is that you cannot critique something if you are too involved with it. It is difficult to get an unbiased critique but that is what they strive for in digital humanities. Critiquing is an essential part of digital humanities but it is also one of the most difficult things to do.

Here is an interesting post that critiques the critique of digital humanities. [(https://www.thenewatlantis.com/text-patterns/critiquing-critique-of-digital)]

This really summarizes what I think the goal of our exercises throughout the semester have been about. We have been trying to find different ways to use code and softwares in order to illustrate ideas and stories. We are not only focusing on the content, but how to display it effectively to our audience and find the best possible ways to present these ideas. In this course it has showed me that there is such a variety of ways information can be presented and that some methods work better than others depending on what we are trying to present.

What I think I love about digital humanities is that it will always shift in some form. You can learn the foundations of the course, but the ways in which that could be approached could change as technology changes. I love that this course encourages reflection and critiques about itself.

I think as someone who knew close to nothing about computers, digital humanities, and software, everything was invisible knowledge to me. Looking at the parts to everything we need to make visible for studying is a good question to ask.

I wonder what Canada's regulation is like. Also I wonder what sort of regulations have been/ could be put in place to curb google? I am not well versed in that aspect of tech and law/policy.

There is a podcast called Behind the Bastards that did a whole episode on how the dewey decimal system was created by a not great guy and how the system has it's creator's bias ingrained into it. The title of the podcast is The Man Who Pioneered Libraries and Sexual Harassment if anyone is interested.

I watched this video (https://youtu.be/sfkYXVdkUEE) recently about the gatekeeping and issues with the academia aesthetic. It brings up issues that align with what this article has talked about so far. It is nice to see these status quos and accepted norms questioned and criticized for their bias and perpetuations of harmful stereotypes. And the fact that it is done here, in an academic paper and in formats like youtube makes it more accessible and I think just having more content out there in general critiquing these norms is good overall

We had a week where we listened to a podcast and read an article about how algorithms can be biased and since then I've had at least two conversations with people about this, explaining to them that algorithms are not as infallible as we take them to be.

Both Figures 1.5 and 1.6 display the bias that is prevalent in algorithmic coding. They show the bigotry of what stereotypical thoughts of each race were.

You can see more examples in the attached link

An example of this that I distinctly remember was when you would google "three black teenagers" it would have the google images page riddled with mugshots, but when googling "three white teenagers" you would find stock images of 3 children doing everyday activities. Google also ended up changing the results as they should, but it never should've been an issue. Which also could've been avoided through manual checks as all algorithms should go through (I realize that this seems crazy to do manually but Google is also a multi-billion company and definitely can allocate resources to this if they so wished to).

This is very true and a sad reality of algorithms, as many think they are objective truths when in reality they are not! In terms with Cathy O’Neil the examples of what she introduces directly align with this Chapter. (As well as her statements from the above paragraph) Such as the case with the teachers being fired based on a faulty system of grading teachers. (The code was withheld from all of New York).

Once everyone realizes that algorithms are nothing more than just opinions that have been constructed in a way to trick society into thinking they are fact.

The main issue with algorithms are they are based on the past, but our past is clearly riddled with issues, so the use these codes leads to us essentially repeating these issues.

This is such a powerful way of advertising. This really incorporates the "Digital Creativity as Critical Material Thinking" point that creativity is essential to digital humanities. Incorporating creativity with digital techniques has the possibility to have such a strong impact on the audience.

This shows how digital methods can bring to light new evidence. The fact that these are the most commonly searched phrases when typing about women really exposes how many issues there still are with women's rights. I was curious after reading this so I typed "women should not" into the google search engine and the first autosuggestion was "a women should not teach men" and "a women should not be in combat roles." I was shocked after seeing that these are what people are actually searching into the engine.

My goodness, no. So much information out in the world, I think especially now as we've had the internet much longer, is false. It can be really hard to know what is real from what is fake. So many people are quick to click the first link, assume it's true, and proceed to spread false information unknowingly to their families, friends, and loved ones.

I am somewhat relieved to know that when I searched up black girls now, 11 years from when she describes, there were no porn links at all. However, I cannot imagine how awful it would be to be a person of colour, maybe want to look up some pictures of people like you, and be faced with porn and sexualization.

I will not stop yelling how far we still have to go for gender equality. It is literally absurd how not long ago the hatred and pain everyone but the white cisgender man went through. As much as we would like to think things have gotten better, and they definitely have, there is still so much work that needs to be done. The digital humanity space has made this growth easier but also difficult in some ways too. There is still much hate in the world and it really hurts to see.

This brings a whole nother meaning to death of the author

It's interesting that this writing links creativity to critical thinking. I watched a video a long time ago, I looked for it but was unable to find it, it was an educator or scientist talking about how inquisitive and questioning children are in early elementary school but by the time you get high school they don't really ask questions. The video is, I believe getting at how traditional school tends to grind out the questioning, critical thinking and therefore creative mindset of its students. It's doubly interesting then, in my experience, that these are the mental traits that are highly valued in university education (and post university education/ work)

This act of translating digital works to physical could be considered an art form itself

There are limitations to DH, it is easy to get lost in piles on piles of data and potential for mistakes and creating of 'culture' that overlooks whats truly defines culture. DH is suseptible to exploitations and the propagation of myths. It is already difficult to differentiate between false and truthful sources online, DH is not immune to this effect.

I don't think I've seen this exact concept come up in our course so far and thinking back to the maps we made last week it certainly seems to be true. If videos or links to other webpages were included in the maps we made, printing them out or even someone recording a video of a walkthrough of the map would be significantly different than if someone got to experience the map themselves in its original digital format. It's an interesting concept that they tie to non-digital humanities with their example about translating poetry.

Roopika Risam briefly mentioned in her Conference call about how it is bizarre that we can't keep up with scholarship although Twitter being an outlet of digital humanities lists from many people can generally give an idea of what is happening. She also mentioned how FaceBook, although to a lesser extent have changed scholarly communication.

See this change and even finding such articles of lists on Twitter it self was very fascinating as it brought along a sense of anyone being able to follow along as so they wish too. Rather than a set of private emails being exchanged among peers.

I think this was a great change and will help continue both or efficiency in studies as well as DH concepts!

I think this is a great way of learning material. It is an incorporation of both gnosis and poiesis where you learn conceptual information but actually do/make things to give you a better understanding. I learn best through this method too. I like to get a general understanding and then to help solidify this knowledge, practice and create things.

Although the ability to have so much online is in fact revolutionary, some things can "get lost in translation." In making texts into online documents, the actual value of the document, not the data, may be lost. The purpose of the texts in the first place need to be accounted for after being translated, and if they are not, we need to reassess the method we have for developing digital texts.

I feel like this could highlight a lot of different struggles I've faced with people in my life in regards to perspective. I believe it is important to look at things with a variety of angles, not just one approach. To look at something as simply data with deeper reflection isn't enough to me, just as no regard to any data over abstract things isn't ideal to me, either. There needs to be a balance, in every aspect of life.

I often think we can get stuck in our own minds or simply say and not do. Making things I believe will always push yourself and encourage growth.