This week was a very productive week for my project, and much was learned outside of my own work as well. We have delved further into understanding and dissecting the digital humanities as the weeks go on in the fellowship. We have learned that a key aspect of the digital humanities is that anyone can create a project for public use. This allows for anyone to contribute to teaching and providing knowledge. Having the academic liberty to create this knowledge limits larger companies or larger information sources to control what they see as valuable knowledge. With this freedom, there can be much more diversity within the digital humanities sphere. Digital humanities can involve a wide range of genres and topic of learning. This is allowed because of the right that anyone can produce any knowledge they wish to bring to a public sphere. The digital humanities does not require a larger company to check the worthiness of the knowledge, which limits the individual from producing a free thinking project. This academic freedom has mostly positive benefits, yet it could also lead to people spreading false information. There is no check process, which means that hate or other prejudice information could be produced. This does seem like a rarity considering scholars within the digital humanities almost always produce information for good, yet the possibility of prejudice information still lingers.
When students produce digital humanities projects, they are working for a higher learning institution yet their ideas and information they produce are their own. When these higher institutions provide information for the students, it is often by a curriculum. Digital humanities programs allow for the students to create their own idea with the foundational learning they have been taught by higher education. This also causes the higher education knowledge they produce to be more diverse. Students often have different viewpoints and idea which creates a melting pot of information within the digital humanities. This diversity of free information expands further when the higher education institutions allow for their students to collaborate with other schools and their digital humanities. For example, our upcoming trip to Lafayette College is a chance to share the research and knowledge we have gained with other digital humanities peers.
I look forward to producing a final product that can contribute to the knowledge that the digital humanities provide. By having our projects be open access, we have allowed others to tap into free information provided by scholars. By making information like this free, education can be provided through outlets other than large academic institution. Since these projects remain free, no large company or conglomerate would form to make money off the product. When money is left out of it, the information remains much more independent and true to the author. Nonprofits such as CreativeCommons allow for the legal use of the information, which creates a flow of free information. As the digital humanities continue to grow, I hope that the information remains free and true to the author.
