Digital Literacy Narative
When I hear the words digital literacy, I immediately think of my ability to operate my cell phone. After giving my initial ideas a lot of thought, I’m sure digital literacy encompasses a little bit more. With this idea, I don’t believe my grandmother would be regarded as a very digitally literate person, so perhaps this needs some revision. After using my go-to search engine, Google, I learned that digital literacy refers to a specific set of skills that enable you to participate fully and function in the digital world. In this Introduction to Digital Arts and Humanities Class, the topic of digital literacy comes across quite frequently, and in doing so, it lends to the question, why? Why digital literacy? According to an interview with Florian Schneider, “Why Digital Humanities?”, he states that promoting these digitally literate skills is in fact a key component of the digital humanities because technological advancements have made it possible to see the world in new ways. The interdisciplinary, open, digital, and critical nature of the digital humanities extend the logic of these skills through critical thinking and good work in the humanities in four easy steps.
Being digitally literate is something I think is expected of me as a 19-year-old. Being at ease with technology and using it effectively and efficiently is second nature to me; however, unlike my younger siblings, I did not grow up with my face glued to an iPad, so this second nature was something I developed as my life progressed. Therefore, even though I consider myself to be digitally literate, I think true digital literacy involves using technology correctly and responsibly, as opposed to just knowing how to use it. My use of social media websites like Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, and WhatsApp vary throughout my daily life. My main reason is to reconnect not only with friends and family, but also with my home country, as I no longer live there. Since I can only communicate with my twin islands through a digital platform, I have had to develop the skills necessary to function and take part in the activities I long to be a part of from a distance. For instance, to account for the time difference, I typically post content in the early morning hours. Being 8 hours apart makes it extremely challenging to manage daily obligations and have a conversation with friends and family via these platforms, so it is typically necessary to plan ahead.
Alongside my personal usage, I also heavily rely on digital literacy for my academics. I’ve enrolled in Introduction to Digital Arts and Humanities to broaden my digital environment and through this experience and our many assignments, I’ve already learned a lot. To begin, we each developed our own website, using GitHub pages whereby we utilized markdown, a simple markup language, to add formatting components to our website without the need for formal text editors or coding languages like HTML. Being a computer science major, I personally find this to be useful because it ties together aspects of computer science that I am familiar with and aspects of design and creativity that you are not always exposed to in the field. This brings to memory the article “Creativity can be the Bridge between Science and Humanities Education,” where chemist and novelist C. P. Snow discussed the division between science and the humanities as well as the frequent lack of respect and understanding between the two fields. He contends that this is detrimental to the world’s future success blaming “our fanatical belief in educational specialization” and our emphasis on “producing a tiny elite educated in one academic skill”, essentially criticising the ideology of solutionism and echoing the quote by Viktor Vicsek “a jack of all trades is a master of none but better than a master of one”.
Additionally, our corpus assignment was one of the assignments that best reflected my understanding of digital literacy. We were given a corpus of textual data for this assignment, and we had to analyse it using various textual analysis tools we had learned about in class. I was able to directly link the humanities’ digital threads here, and to me, this is how digital humanities should ideally work. The events leading up to this assignment, which marked the end of this section of our syllabus, were also very interesting. We used distant viewing to investigate various facets of the corpus and provided data using tools like Voyant tools, Project Mirador, and R Posit Cloud. According to Arnold and Tilton, in their article,Distant Viewing: Analyzing Large Visual CorSpora distant viewing is the exploratory analysis of extracted and aggregated metadata in order to view larger patterns within a corpus that may be challenging to discern. We were able to see this in action, comprehend the nuances and complexities of the humanities, and thereby expand our digital literacy skills by freely exploring various aspects of the data and corpus, without solutionism but rather with open arms, ready to receive whatever the data would give us.
Through this class, I’ve been able to expand my perspective on digital literacy to include how well you integrate it into your daily life rather than just how well you use digital applications. Since my daily life as a student is centred around learning, digital literacy for me means imagining a curriculum where the world of creativity is placed in the middle of it. A course of study that, in essence, combines theory and practice and promotes the application of some of the basic creative abilities. This is supported by Berry and Fagerjord in their article “On the Way to Computational Thinking,” where they contend that education must adopt a holistic strategy that integrates computational thinking with other areas of study and places a strong emphasis on creativity, teamwork, and critical thinking. This all-encompassing strategy incorporates creativity, which derives from the feelings I experience and the knowledge I gain while looking for a solution, as well as analytical thinking skills. Everything here complies exactly with my understanding of digital literacy.
These teamwork trends are also reflected in Lyenne Siemens’ article “It’s a team if you use ‘‘reply all’’’: An exploration of research teams in digital humanities environments”, which discussed the social aspect of the digital humanities. In class, we talked about how this might be applied to our final unproject. In doing so, we looked into the benefits and challenges of team interactions as well as how these interpersonal factors may contribute to our professional success. In the digital humanities, teamwork and active interaction help you think more broadly and improve your digital literacy as you bounce ideas off of your colleagues.
In conclusion, I particularly understand the frustrations associated with digital platforms, mainly because of my major, however, this class has eased those frustrations and instead have given me sophisticated data analysis and manipulation programs that enable me to use data in ways that are not possible in a physical environment. My eyes have been opened to the wide range of technology and tools available for managing and analysing research data as a result of this digital arts and humanities course, from geo-mapping street names in Latin America, to project mirador where we compare detailed similarities between objects, this new outlook on digital platforms that allows me to bask in the journey without focusing strictly on solutionism, is a change well outside of my purview, but a comforting one and one that I continue to look forward to as I hope for a future where all classes mirror this one.