Digital Humanities

For my first assignment in digital tools and methods, I were tasked with exploring crowdsourcing initiatives and contributing to one closely related to my arts minor or of personal interest to me. I was guided to a website called Zooniverse to find a crowdsourcing initiative of interest. Zooniverse is a citizen science web portal that grew out of a project called Galaxy Zoo and now host many projects across many disciplines (Wikipedia(Zooniverse) 2017).  

This blog post will help explain the process I went through to create a digital artefact for my DH2001 Concepts and Collaborations module. For one of our assignments we were tasked with creating a digital artefact, it could be anything we wanted as long as it was digitally created. We could work in groups or work by yourself, I chose the latter as I had a very specific idea of what I wanted to do and It was connected to my East Asian religions module which no one else in my class was taking.

Realsim is a company that creates realtime 3D simulations for their clients. Started 8 years ago in Galway and with a team having over 20 years of experience in 3D animations and spatial technologies, Realsim are at the forefront in the 3D simulation business in the fields of planning and heritage. I got to sit down with Gary Dempsey of Realsim to discuss what they do and what can we expect from them in the future. Galway has become a popular place for new innovative businesses, while Realsim set up in Galway mainly because the director of the company is based there.

Since starting my studies in Digital humanities I have been shown a lot of fascinating projects and tools in the realm of DH. One area that caught my attention last year was interactive stories. We were shown digital stories like Bear 71, Rome and S (an interactive book by Doug Dorst and JJ Abrams) which I loved and now this medium has me fascinated.

We have been discussing research, knowledge and knowledge the last few weeks. At present we are working on research questions that we have chosen ourselves.Furthermore we are working through the different processes to collect data and create information from it that will become knowledge. The words data, information and knowledge are interesting and something we discussed the meaning of in class. Are they the same? What is the difference between them? I see them as different stages in a process of understanding.

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.  

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.