Bio
I am a college student, that has a passion for the intricacy of human innovation and exploration. Whether I'm trekking around the Minnesota Boundary Waters, or learning about how computers crunch numbers, I always do it with a passion. On this site you'll find what I discovered, while looking into the rich and new subject that is Digital Humanities.
Breaking into a Field: What is Digital Humanites
To understand what Digital Humanities means, we must first understand what digital means. According to Dictionary.com digital has about ten different meaning ranging from having to do with technology, to the fingers on your hand. Humanities is also a word with many definitions online, ranging from multiple human populations to the study of literature and art. While many would say that when talking about Digital Humanities, some of those definitions apply more than others, the fact that they exist brings to light why digital humanities is such an enigmatic thing. Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. had to think about this to explain this field in their 2016 book Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field. In the introduction to the book they describe how Digital Humanities is much like sculpting, in that is can take any form, literally in the case of sculpting. This leads to a broad field. In order to help their readers understand the basic makeup of the field, they gave some examples. Much like when one explains the basics of sculpting, Michelangelo’s David sculpture is hard to leave out of the discussion. Here is an example of Digital Humanities.
This example would be an example of Digital Humanities that stems from the field of History. The author explains, however, that Digital Humanities, is not simply limited to this small scope, as this site clearly shows an example from the field of Sports.
The examples could go on, but by now you have realized that the scope of the subject is rather large. This concept is what the authors of Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field call the big tent concept, which brings to mind that there is always more room within. Many fields have started their move into this tent, although this move doesn't come without issue. It can involve distancing oneself from the field, which can lead to financial implications, as well as not being taken as seriously. However, the author reassures its readers that these are problems of the past, and that all field are being required to make this move, or risk becoming obsolete, under the radar.
In the introduction of the book, the author presents the worries of many DHers, as they call them (which doesn’t make much sense, as DHers would expand to Digital Humanists-ers, but that is beside the point) as they struggle to integrate the field, as all of these participants may originate from different fields before Digital Humanities was even a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye. The author states that Digital Humanities has forced professions to come together in order to make more expansive bodies of work. This interaction of course has been going on for years in the corporate world, as an engineer can not sell a car that has a 900 horsepower engine, if it looks like a PT cruiser. Digital Humanities has forced academics to make this shift as well.
In a later chapter of the book everson becomes a focus of the author's attention. This seems to be a change that the author noticed since writing the first edition of the book back in 2012. This observation is that the term cyberspace, has become outdated, as that make it sound like the user is leaving their normal life, in order to travel to this place called the cyberspace. The shift these days is that the Internet has everted, or flipped inside out. Instead of the user going to the cyberspace, the user is constantly a part of the digital experience, being able to contribute, whenever they want. This shift came of course in 2006 with the introduction of the iPhone, which allowed the user to browse the web in a computer like fashion, on the go, although many would say that this goal wasn’t accomplished until the iPhone 3, but the first device at least put pressure on competitors, into making the World Wide Web more accessible on the go.
The author discusses a book called Neuromancer by William Gibson. In the book, Gibson discusses a world of cybernetics, or the most extreme version of this eversion process, in which the world itself would be created by a network of computers. He saw this happening, because he noticed that the ultimate goal of gamers at the time of him writing this books, in the mid 80s was to immerse themselves in the gaming world, or be on the “other side of the screen” as he put it. You can see this desire today, as we have shows like Westworld on HBO. In the show they give a great example of the cybernetic world that Gibson was talking about. The show takes place in this "Park" of the future, in which rich people pay lots of money, in order to roam free in this wild west simulation, in which they are invincible to the 3D printed AI, that the company creates. It is hard to make the distinction of whether these beings in the show are cybernetic or artificial intelligence. As I have only watched two episodes, I can not give a complete in depth comparison of the conclusions that can be drawn. However, I did watch enough to know that the point of the show seems to be the exploration of what is the difference between artificial intelligence and cybernetics. This distinction could mean the difference between the humans in the show living or dying, as it seems that the artificial intelligent beings are becoming completely autonomous, and not able to be controlled by the human beings. This would mark their transition between artificially intelligent to cybernetic. These are important issues to explore, as this is the next frontier for this field. In this TED Talk the speaker discusses some of the problems that could arise from this next frontier, and finding ways to avoid them.
Digital Humanities, a extremely complex and ever growing field, is the future of intellectual advancement. A field that was created by humans could at the same time make us obsolete, and end our species. However, if we do this right, it could make our lives extremely easy. This is the situation faced by the characters of Westworld. In the show, one of the characters says, “We can cure any disease and create anything from scratch, we can do it all. There is nowhere further for us to go.” However, once you have accomplished these tasks, you must then answer the question that even the characters in the show don’t know the answer to, and that is who we are, what are we doing, and what are we made of. This is the definition of digital humanities that you won’t find in Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field.
Sources
- http://luna.library.wmich.edu/luna/servlet/view/all?sort=Date%2CTitle&pgs=50&res=1&cic=WMUwmu~82~82
- http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/2
- http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/arts/artwork/michelangelo-sculptures7.htm
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nt3edWLgIg
- http://polygraph.cool/nba/
Arduino: Easy to Use Electronics
This week as part of the class, we went to the vLab in downtown Statesboro in order to learn a few things about Arduinos. This is an open source microcontroller technology that can output digital signals, as well as simulate analog signals, which it does by quickly oscillating a digital signal at a frequency. These devices can be used for many applications, including an interesting example that Shawn Jackson, the instructor told us about. He got a humidity sensor, and used the Arduino to water a plant, by putting a servo, or electric motor, at the end of a hose, and when the sensor reads that the plant is dry it will tell the servo to release the hose. He said that it's been three years since he did this, and he says that his plant is doing fine. This intrigued me, and I was thinking about doing this with some sort of bonsai tree.
To start off the tutorial, we looked through the kits that were left there for us. They included many interesting devices and add-ons, such as some stuff that myself and professor Jim, my partner, dealt with later on in the tutorial. These include basic digital logic manipulators, such as decoders, multiplexors and shift registers. There were also basic digital displays and seven segment displays, that could be used on a scoreboard. For the beginning exercise, we would just be needing the LED, and a resistor, as well as the metal wires, that we would be using to connect everything. Below you will see the circuit that we created, along with the code that was uploaded to the Arduino. You can see this code by pressing code editor.This circuit was created in a useful Arduino simulating program, that I used in an engineering class . Its free, which is convenient, as the kits we were using as part of the tutorial were around forty dollars. However, I did feel like I was able to understand how the components worked much faster when dealing with the device in person, as it was simply faster to test things in that environment.
Blink
When looking at the simulation, it is important to know that the blinking light on the Arduino is connected to pin 13, which we are supplying power to hence why the light is blinking as well. As you can see this project simply makes the light blink, which helps the user understand the difference between what is on and what is off, and how to communicate this command to the Arduino. The breadboard, or the large white thing with holes in it, is an interesting device, that helps the user to organize the components being used. It is important when making a circuit to remember that the circuit always needs to begin with a power source, and end at ground. The next thing we did in order to better understand how this interaction took place is to change the numbers around that control how long the light is on and how long it is off.
Potentiometer
After understanding how the code worked, we went on a venture to see how quickly we could make the light blink, before we couldn’t tell that it is blinking. As the numbers you see represented in the delay function are in microseconds, we simply changed these numbers, and observed the blinking. We determined that it is somewhere around 12 microseconds that this phenomena occurs. Next Professor Jim and I were getting bored with our blinking circuit, so he introduced me to the potentiometer. This device works, by sending the electric signal along a resistor, and the current can exit depending on how far down in voltage out is. In this case we used a 10k potentiometer, which means that the resistor used in the device is a 10,000 ohm resistor. In this simulation, if the current going through an LED is to great then it will show that it has exploded. Of course this doesn’t happen in real life, the device will just heat up, and there will be current that leaks back through the device. This can damage your Arduino, which is why I included a small resistor before the current goes through the potentiometer. This makes it so that even when the potentiometer is at it's lowest resistance, the circuit will not do what is called a short circuit. This happens when there is so much current, that the wires heat up and the circuit fails. This is why you have fuses in your car, as things can get out of hand in second, as the electric signals can travel back in forth across a wire millions of times in a second.
Potentiometer Schematic Diagram
Earlier in the blog I discussed how I wanted to make a plant water system. I looked up a plan for the sensor on a website. I attempted to make the diagram on the simulation website that you see above, but they did not have a humidity sensor to use, so I tried it with an ultrasonic distance sensor, but that had digital input instead of analog like the humidity sensor required for the project. Here is the diagram, without the sensor, and it uses a relay to turn on the motor to pump water to the plant, as you cannot power the motor with the voltage from the Arduino, as it is too low.
This experience of going to the vLab was extremely interesting, as it got me thinking about all the things that you could do with such as simple device. People have used these to automate their home, water their plants, create a 3D printer and pretty much everything under the sun that impresses the ladies. At the end of our visit we were bestowed with small 3D printed robots. This was my first time seeing something that was 3D printed, and I was certainly excited.
Sources
- http://eeenthusiast.com/arduino-plant-watering-drip-feed-system/
- https://circuits.io/