Noah Sang-Jin Pietrafesa

I am a 21 year old IM Student studying at NYUAD. I am a mixed Korean and Italian from New York, USA. I like music, art, games, coding, and data science.

As a 21-year-old university student, my journey into the world of digital humanities has been nothing short of exhilarating. The digital landscape is my second home, but enrolling in an introductory course in digital humanities has opened up a realm I never thought possible. In this narrative, I’ll share my strategies for content creation, social interaction, and research data management while reflecting on my current abilities, course discoveries, and future aspirations.

Social Interaction:

Social interaction in my digital life primarily happens through messaging apps, video calls, and social media. It’s effortless to stay connected with friends and family across the globe. However, the digital humanities course has introduced me to the power of online communities dedicated to academic discourse. Platforms like Twitter and Reddit foster discussions on various topics, and while I don’t engage with these communities, I still read to learn from experts, share insights, and challenge my perspectives. I’m gradually becoming aware of the importance of responsible and respectful digital citizenship in these spaces.

Research Data Management:

Before this course, I had experience utilizing databases such as Project Gutenberg and used programs such as Numpy and Matplotlib to visualize data. In digital humanities, there are many more vast amounts of data from diverse sources. I’ve also been introduced to tools like Zotero, which help in organizing and citing sources efficiently. Moreover, data manipulation and analysis have become essential skills in my academic toolbox and one in which I have a great interest in. I’m excited to delve deeper into data visualization and analysis software like Tableau and R to unlock the potential of digital data in humanities research. Oftentimes I found myself wanting to do data analysis of my own, with things such as analyzing my Spotify listening data or trying to use an API of a card database for Magic: the Gathering, a beloved card game of mine. Due to the limitations of my skills however, I have found much difficulty trying to make these projects, and would always find myself giving up before I could do anything. I hope that this course will be able to push me in the right direction in being able to analyze data for my projects successfully.

Critical Reflection:

While my digital literacy skills have served me well in personal and academic contexts, the digital humanities course has revealed the vast potential I’ve yet to explore. It’s challenging to transition from casual content creation to scholarly digital storytelling, but I see this as an opportunity for personal and intellectual growth. Learning to navigate online academic communities is both exciting and daunting, but I’m determined to engage thoughtfully and meaningfully.

Regarding research data management, I’ve realized the importance of data ethics and privacy concerns. As I explore data-driven research, I want to ensure that my work aligns with ethical guidelines and respects individuals’ privacy. Additionally, I’m eager to learn more about data visualization techniques to make my research findings more accessible and engaging to a wider audience.

What I Would Like to Learn:

As I progress in my digital humanities course, I hope to enhance my abilities in the following areas:

Advanced Digital Storytelling:

I want to master the art of crafting compelling narratives that incorporate various digital media, such as interactive websites, podcasts, and immersive virtual experiences.

Data Ethics and Privacy:

Understanding the ethical considerations and legal aspects of data collection, storage, and dissemination is crucial for responsible research.

Advanced Data Analysis:

I aspire to become proficient in powerful data analysis tools like Python, R, and specialized software for humanities research.

Collaborative Research:

Learning to collaborate effectively with peers and experts in the digital humanities field to tackle complex research questions and projects.

By enrolling in Digital Arts and Humanities, I have quickly learned that there is much more to this topic than just simple social media platforms and emails. It is quite a deep world, one which I have only scratched the mere surface. I have learned much in the ways of actually finding and using data for analysis. While I have used the aforementioned Project Gutenberg, I found using tools such as Antconc and Voyant Tools to be a great eye-opening experience of how powerful these tools can be for analyzing word data.

I remember having to use rudimentary hand-written code to scrape words from downloaded Project Gutenberg corpora, and I was unable to do very advanced things other than word frequencies and being frustrated that I could not do more with my skills to tabulate data better. My project was assessing the linguistic validity of Zipf’s Law, which states the most frequently used word in a language should appear twice as often as the second-most frequently used word, which should be twice as frequent as the third-most frequently used word, and so on. My data ended up being very messy and biased as my only sources were fictional books and movie subtitles, but it did somewhat prove that the theory holds true. The messiest part was when trying to analyze the law in other languages than English, where things like word structures and my lack of grammatical and syntactical knowledge gave me faulty data. If given the opportunity, I would like to try doing a project like this again, and I believe some of the data analysis tools I learned to use in this course would help make utilizing and analyzing data much easier.

In conclusion, my journey into the world of digital humanities as a 21-year-old university student has been both challenging and inspiring. It has forced me to critically examine my digital literacy skills and consider how they can be harnessed for academic and intellectual pursuits. With newfound knowledge and a thirst for learning, I am excited to explore the limitless possibilities that digital humanities offer, while responsibly navigating the digital frontier.