Blog Posts

Our last DH 2001 class was insightful and gave me things to think about, which is always a good way to leave a lecture. I have been trying to think of areas of interest and where to focus my studies. What angle do I want to approach a certain topic, what tools and methods do I want to use, what are my expectations from certain ideas and what will the outcome of my work be? Maybe I am thinking too much about it but I like to know what I am doing and how I am going to start something instead of just jumping in blindly.

I have come to the conclusion that a focus on creating some sort of interactive stories that connects my arts minor and my other interests is the best way forward. To tell a story about the history of Shinto religion using Music, Games, Art and Technology is my goal.  

I thought I would write a quick post about my summer to get back into the swing of things before the academic year. It has been a long summer I have to say, finishing my exams at the very start of May has given me four months off. The week after I finished my exams I was off to Cartagena, Spain to take part in a tech start up scrum run by EU-XCEL and partnered with UCC. I had been accepted for this all expenses paid trip the month before and I was looking forward to the challenge of learning the scrum ideology.

We have been exploring different textual visualisation tools for the past few weeks in class. For our final assignment we are to explore and see what we can learn from a text of our choosing using these kinds of tools. I decided to explore the book Bram Stoker's Dracula and look at the comparisons between the book and the 1992 film screenplay of the same name starring Gary Oldman, Keanu Reeves and Wynona Ryder. Both the book and the film are one of my favourite stories from my youth and that was before vampires were cool.

OpenStreetMap is a new application to me, one that we are exploring in our Digital Humanities class. It is a very beneficial open source mapping tool that lets anyone map any part of the world. Using satellite imagery from Bing and other mapping techniques, you can map any place on the planet.

When you think of a digital scholarly tool you might think of Google Scholar, Evernote or something along that line, however there are so many other tools out there that can help you in different ways with your scholarly needs. For my Digital Humanities class I were asked to find a digital scholarly tool that would be useful for my own future research, play around with it and review it to see what conclusions I came to. The tool I chose to review is WorldMap.

Storytelling has been around since the birth of mankind in one form or another. At its most basic form, stories were told by painting wild animals or hand prints on cave walls. The interactions with these stories were limited to whoever happen to go into that cave and see the drawings. It has evolved a lot since then, and through the ages people have invented new ways to tell their story (“An Evolution of Mankind and Visual Communication.”, 2015).  

On the 12th of November, Beirut was attacked when two suicide bombers killed 43 civilians and wounded many others. While the next day Paris suffered co-ordinated attacks throughout the city leaving 130 citizens dead and nearly four hundred injured. Both Daesh attacks were carried out by the militant group known as ISIL. These events are very tragic and it is hard to know how to react to them but the questions that come to mind when looking through the internet, are: what impact is social media having in the aftermath of these events?