Okay, so to start off, let me say that I attempted most of the reading…most. I was terribly overwhelmed by the amount of reading we had to do on the first week of school on a subject that we know, let’s admit, nothing about. Well, as a class that knows nothing about DH.

Before being introduced to the question or the class, I never really thought about what the position of the Humanities. I knew that I belonged to the Humanities department at CSUN, and that was pretty much it. However, after starting class last week, I began paying attention to what it means to be a part of the humanities department and what that means in regards to today’s society. In more than two of my classes, my professor’s mentioned that literature was a dying major, that books themselves are becoming a thing of the past (Bye, Borders), and that maybe there wasn’t a point. Then, (cue heroic music) I got to experience the Digital Humanities class. For a brief moment that I felt like a failure because I was part of the Humanities Department…then I got to see where it all was going. What the potential was and what we could be turning into. With the use of technology, the humanities can become, instead of dead or dying thing, a thing of today’s society. Like our classmates have been saying, technology is ever present now, more than ever, and cannot be ignored. It is infiltrating every inch of our lives from the way we communicate, to the way we learn, and the way we problem solve. And that is, after all, part of what the Humanities is (at least the last two.)

After being drowned in the reading this week, I went back to my notes and found that the person I find a common ground with the subject…to a certain degree… is Jerome McGann. I’ll be honest and say several of the articles made me feel how I felt in class, confused and slightly frustrated. The reason I liked McGann’s piece is because I was able to understand what he was trying to say and really appreciated and absorbed some of his statements. His discussions about the Humanities moving to a more digitally governed environment stated the fears that I have or discomforts that most of us have in tryin to learn or understand the DH. Not only that, but I was able to actually relate to something he said. For example, McGann says, “We may well feel ‘a violent wish  to escape’ both of these unfolding—and closely enfolded histories, but we do better to recall that as we are characters in these events,  we bear a responsibility toward them.” What I loved about that was he was describing exactly how I felt the first day of our DH class. I had no idea what was going on and it was frustrating still walking out and just saying, “WTF?!” However, continuing down the article, McGann also begins talking how it is important not to distinguish the two as opposites and “Not between a dead world and a world powerless to be born, however, but between two living worlds, one relatively young, the other ancient.  He neither abandons the one nor refuses the other…” This statement adds a bit of comfort to us English majors because in the beginning, it was almost terrifying hearing that text was dying, that everything is turning into computers. McGann made me sit back and be more open to the idea of a digitally advanced humanities department. I love the “ancient” aspect of my major and interest, but now, hearing McGann put the two cultures side by side like that and seeing the situation in a different light, I am more opening to accept them both and appreciate them both.

I believe that we have gotten to such a point in our lives, that you can say we have been split between two cultures. Even more so, we can say that technology has become prevalent and text (not the electronic form), literature, etc has become a thing of the past. For us deeply in love with or involved with the Humanities, we definitely see them both as we are surrounded by both world, but we take little time to see how one another affect each other. Now, taking this class, I hope to see a way in which, as scary as this sound, both are equally as important and they benefit one another in order to become a unified field that can successfully be defined and used as a tool to further the development of Humanities. However, even after our pages upon pages of reading, it’s going to take some convincing to really make m feel that way, so bring it on, Professor Kleinman.