Code and the Digital Hummanities

There is technology all around us. Everyone has heard this sentence about a thousand times. This is not a new idea, we have known this simple fact for the past few decades. Though its importance on our daily life is growing everyday. As we progress with technology more and more, we find more uses for it. One of the those uses is using code to help in the study of humanities. Languages like Python or Java can be extremely helpful to study things that would have been to complex long ago. For example, if we wanted to count the frequency of a word in every book that has been written in the past 100 years, that would be an extremely long process. Though with the power of computers and code it has brought a easier solution to figuring out this problem. A simple script can now show how many times a word has been used between a certain time frame. Something that could have taken researchers years to come to conclusion can now only take seconds. This is where digital humanities succeeds, and really shows off its intelligence. We can graph the amount of times certain writing styles appear, and see a visual representation of that effect throughout the years. There are an almost infinite amount of possibilities that can arise blending computer code with the study of humanities. In class we did a demo of how to write a program that can do word analysis. This is a very foreign topic to me, because the only code I am even slightly familiar with is a Arduino. Seeing the code up on the screen is very daunting, and a little nerve racking; but to see the end result of the script is quite amazing, and the speed is can do it with is inspiring. I can’t wait to see what possibilities coding can add to the digital humanities as well as personal projects.

Written on September 21, 2016 by Matthew Schindler