This line reminded me of something a friend told me recently. The last few generations of humans will be the first generations that will have living memories (Videos and audio) of them living their lives. To think that in several hundred years, someones great great great great grandchild may be able to pull up a video of us today and say to their grandchildren that this is how we used to be/look/interact with our world is immensely interesting in my opinion. We don't have videos of what life was like in the 1500's. We do have paintings and records and thus can fill in the blanks with our imaginations, but future generations won't have to employ that technique nearly as much as we do.

Digital humanities have something that very few practices have had the fortune to enjoy in their early years. It can pull from every culture and country on the planet to help shape its identity and form.

It's interesting to think on how much we have covered over the semester as well as how much we have been engaging with digital humanities without realizing it. If you had asked me prior to the start of the semester to define digital humanities, I would have no idea what the subject entailed in the slightest. Now, I feel as if I have a grasp on the subject, yet there is still so much to learn and understand as the field itself is vast.

I wonder if certain key historical figures who had a massive societal impact used specific strings of words, connections to other words and specific language that we can correlate to each other. If such connections exist, the applications could be endless in our society. Imagine having the cheat sheet to grow a social movement of any sort. This idea both excites and terrifies me at the same time.

It is increasingly more common to find these mediums of societal information available only in the digital space. To me, this means that there is not only an opportunity but rather a necessity for distant reading for those interested in pursuing the humanities of our own day and age as well as into the future of our society.

On more of a personal note, I find that the information to be garnered from distant reading can be much more interesting and insightful to more impactful subjects overall. One could read a singular novel and infer a few details about the author and what they are trying to convey or analyze several thousand novels from a specific time or culture and infer interesting notions such as the values of the time/culture and how they preferred to communicate.

I am interested in seeing how far we can ( if there truly is a limit) push the combination of computation onto social sciences. Will we one day have such a deep understanding of society and culture that we can boil every interaction down to a singular algorithm? Or is life and society too complex and random to have anything defined so precise? Only time will tell.

This statement rings especially true for me. As someone who spends a large amount of time learning about technology and software, it can be absurd how complex our everyday household objects are. When trying to explain these ideas to someone who hasn't studied or invested a similar amount of time into the subject, it can be quite the challenge to reach an understanding on why something is or isn't working.

I think this approach to the matter is a fantastic step forward to such a sensitive issue. The items being archived are no more the archivist's property than they are the institutions property. These records belong to a culture that we should aim to preserve independently of our own, and we cannot truly attempt such a feat if we try to claim ownership over every piece we host. After all, in essence, these records are knowledge that local indigenous communities are offering to preserve for us as opposed to it being lost to time. Some of it may never be shared with outsiders of that community, yet some of it may be shared, and surely that value alone would be worth the cost of the preservation programs.

To give an analogy to this idea, if you could prevent the library of Alexandria from burning, even though you may never personally access it, but others might, would you? or would you let it burn and lose an unknown amount of knowledge and history in the process.

To continue on from my other point, I also support this statement, at least in part. I think that if a survivor of this situation would like their reference to be privatized, then due consideration should be taken in such situations. However, I do not think it would be a good idea to abstain from digitizing records based on this merit alone. I think that a middle ground of blacking out personal information would be a good practice while still keeping the evidence and history of our past intact.

I think that it is important to keep these records of our nation's past as a reminder of where we came from and what horrid mistakes we made. Without these records, future generations may be doomed to repeat the same atrocities committed at residential schools, as well as other places. I also think that the ability to digitize and spread these documents allows the families of those affected to finally find closure in what has happened to their families.

This partially reminds me of what Wikipedia has become and what it stands for. We as a society have one singular resource to check both macro and micro levels of knowledge and fact upon. An argument can be made for the level of its authenticity and correctness, but overall, it is a resource unlike any that humans have ever had beyond massive libraries.

I can relate to this statement in that it sometimes feels like there is almost too much content on the internet. So much so in fact that it is drawing us as a society to spend ever-growing amounts of time online, as opposed to living in reality.

Interesting to think that I have been interacting with metadata for decades without realizing it! It begs the question - What other things have do I use/interact with on a regular basis without realizing it?

When I first heard of Metadata, I assumed it was some complex form of data that would be extracted from human interaction with the internet. Glad to see that it actually is a rather straight-forward and easy to understand term!

It's interesting to compare the authors take on online negativity and the perception of said negativity. Fully public forums (Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook) are open to the public and can be the breeding grounds for some of the most intense negative feedback that humanity can conjure. Yet, here we have a semi closed off forum that still has that open negative criticism as a part of it. Even though the purpose of the forum here was for feedback, in which criticism is a major part of that, it seems that anything online that connects humans to DH or almost any subjective (and sometimes objective) piece can draw out more negativity than positivity. In the real world, it would seem that the reverse holds true. Maybe because we can't see the other person beyond the screen and that drives us to speak our inner most thoughts?

My prediction on this topic is that DH will slowly become more and more prevalent as the old version of humanities becomes a thing of the past. My reasoning behind this is that we as a species tend to ( for the vast majority ) use whatever technology is easiest and most efficient to use. Take for example the fact that we no longer record our thoughts, facts and feelings on stone tablets. We moved on from a more primitive technology onto something more modern (parchment, paper, ect.). That being said, we still do record certain pieces of information into stone to this day (Gravestones, markings, ect.), however, its use has drastically diminished since times past. Relating this back to our current climate, I foresee us always having a place for physical humanities, as we are physical beings, but that the need for such physical representations will diminish just as the need for stone tablets did so long ago.

I agree to the statement this sentence is trying to convey. Digital Humanities have shaken the academic life not only on such a large scale but also in such a short period of time. My parents never had the opportunities in the digital space that I do today, and, I would imagine that may yet be the same for my own children as compared to myself one day.

It's amazing to think about how the digital landscape has ballooned from something no one really used, to a massive part of nearly every humans daily life.