“It is also scholarship that projects, in the sense of futurity, as something which is not yet.”
Burdick et al. “One: Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 124.
The quote above made me think about projects in a way I hadn’t thought of them before. Previously, the word “project” would remind me of grade school and some of my classes here at Carleton where everyone would partner up, divide the tasks, and have about a week or so to finish the assignment. I thought of “projects” as just mere assignments to complete for a grade, probably because I’ve been in school for most of my life. I never really stopped to think about the “projects” that arise in someone’s career and help to shape the world that we live in. Projects are works that form from lots of collaboration between people and sources of data and essentially “project” knowledge into our world that may have not been previously known. Furthermore, projects allow people to study topics and interact with new information so that they can learn and create something of their own to share.
As mentioned before, the word “project” would remind me of school assignments from the past and present. However I’ve worked on other types of projects recently, such as my experience with cancer research last summer and my current research project concerning language analysis with a Carleton professor. It’s quite clear that projects come in many flavors and depend on the area of study one is focusing on. In the future, given the quote, I hope to work on projects in collaboration with professionals in the medical field and other scientific areas such as neuroscience in order to contribute something of value to the global community. This would most likely involve a lot of literature review and lab work as well as the use of sophisticated equipment and analysis software to present the data to others.
This term, I’m mostly excited to delve into the different data and visual modeling software we’ll be using, as well as some basic programming. I believe that doing projects using these tools will be enriching and enjoyable and I’ve always wanted to get more experienced with digital tools and skills since technology governs most of our lives these days. Plus, I’m interested in seeing how exactly people use these tools to restore art and different historical works/data and present them in an engaging manner.
