Database Documentaries:

A documentary can be useful in many ways to create an engaging story which provides a lot of insight and information to the audience. It allows the audience in some sense to understand it all from a certain perspective. However, the disadvantage is that this view is also limited in a way. It provides the audience with only the clips and scenes that a person, the director, decided was essential to show in order to piece the story together. Hence, you’re missing out on a lot of other facts that could’ve been relevant.

Database documentaries work much in the same way. You can have animation, sound, linkes, websites, film, or virtually anything to portray your data in such a stimulating way for the audience. However, it is still bounded within the limits of technology and perspectives. I guess you can say though that information/data has always been bounded within some walls in a certain way. Technology, on one hand, expands those bounds to allow the user to grasp so much more data than they could ever imagine. Yet, on the other hand, usually all of these sources are filtered in some sort of way. So I guess the real question is how do you bring all of the data together without letting any of it be lost in any way? How do you confer “unity upon such a variable experience” (pg 55). Thus is rather difficult and I don’t think there is an answer to that just yet. However, the book does mention that in the meantime while we are trying to figure out that answer, let’s appreciate the fact that having so many variable opinions, ideas, and perspectives is also a really good thing! It allows everybody to exchange thoughts on certain topics and allows for “imaginative expression”(pg.55) from individuals from all over the world.

Computational Activites in Digital Humanities:

Though useful, at times it can be hard to visual a data set using graphical visualization from the computer. For example, the variety of emotions a certain person may be feeling. How do you express that graphically in a variable way where you can see the changes, the effects, and the expressions the person may be going through. Maybe you would like to add how the emotions change with circumstances or with time. What about if the emotions of a person affect another or what if they were triggered by something in the environment the person was in. Basically, what I am trying to get at is that there are a lot of underlying questions and information which may make it difficult to visualize using computers. Data visualization is usually more of a concrete thing rather than abstract. You have your bar graphs, line graphs, and statistical analysis. However, those kinds of representations can also easily limit the amount of information you can convey to the user. This section goes on to mention those limitations and how it affects the real interpretations of the humanistic knowledge of the data, but goes on to explain how important it is to be able to know the graphical tools there are available to represent the data sets. You see, using computers to represent data, though at times they can be limiting, they can also be really useful. You can make graphs dynamic and interactive or add on a bunch of features to better see the information. However, it is important that in order to get a good visualization you first and foremost know what you want to represent and then you get creative with how you want to represent it.