It’s the end-of-the-semester and we know it…So what just happened? A lot of articles have been read, work has been completed, and plenty of blogs have posted not as seamlessly as one would hope. But unlike for R.E.M., it is not the end of the world, and I survived it.

This semester has covered a lot more information than I initially thought it would, even though we did spend the entire first lecture just trying to define what digital humanities is. To keep things rolling, we went to the main forum that is now the manifestation of our class. We used something called GitHub, which was home to our class blog.

Since that first day, fifteen weeks ago, our class has defined digital humanities, and completely flipped it up down and all around. I have gone from being a basic twitter user, to knowing how to research tweet data and all corresponding information, not to mention the apparent quickly accumulating cost. I have seen text analysis, including one that took our class an entire lecture to understand one poem that was broken down by a python code in seconds. I have learned that I can have code do the analysis work for me and when a code can’t, MTurk exists, where I draw on others for help.

Our semester has covered a variety of information much broader than any other class I have ever taken. It is doubtful that all of it will be used in my future. I don’t think I will personally be analyzing T Swift’s Blank Space video but it is interesting to know that by doing so, you can form a great argument about her being psycho. That’s not even mentioning Mike D’s very informative and entertaining lecture on iMovie that followed. I may not be someone that uses iMovie, but at least I have a concept of it now, so when I need to make a video for my org next semester, I might be helpful to my colleagues working on media and know what they are doing (so I don’t ask dumb questions).

So, from all of this, I have written many blog posts, questioned some things in class, failed to post a few blogs, yelled at my computer for not posting blogs, and found the smallest mistakes preventing me from posting a blog (to the point that I wanted to rip my hair out).

All of this has been brought together to create my research paper. I have researched data, gone through the process of working around sites, processed information, and finally formulated it into a report. Quite soon, all of this will be submitted to Github and be on our class blog.

As lackluster as I may have seemed during lecture, I found this course quite interesting. Even though it often was as confusing as my Structural Analysis course (that I probably am not going to pass), I think I have taken quite a bit away from this course. I hope this course continues to be offered here at Illinois Tech, and that many others give it a try.