Hey y’all,
My name is Kevin and I’m currently a Sophomore debating between doing a BA in Math, CS, or both. I’m from Portland, OR, where I’ve spent most of the childhood that I remembered but technicality wise I was born in Vietnam. This will be my first year as a Digital Humanities Associate, I’m super excited to be on the team, and I look forward to working with all of you. Though I’ve only had the 2 classes I’ve taken with Austin to serve as my DH Resume, I think I’ll be useful…but if not I sometimes make good puns so I promise I’ll at least be entertaining.
Thoughts on the past projects:
I’ve got to say, the Workhouse project from HIST 235 was definitely my favorite from the list of past DH projects at Carleton. Though all of the projects seemed interesting, this was the one that caught my eyes because 1) Austin mentioned it in our Hacking the Humanities class 2 winters ago and 2) there’s the word Unity Game engine mentioned somewhere in the synopsis. I played a lot of games growing up and coincidentally have just started looking into game-dev these past couple of weeks, so like…it just seemed really cool. I liked the fact that a past student tried to gamify a historical concept to show folks what life was like in the 1800s, and Escaping the House seemed like it could be a very fun game to play!
Glass Animals:
First thing first, I’ve got to get this off my chest by prefacing that I’m 1 generation too young for this website. The reason being that I have to look up the OS that it’s trying to imitate and even then I couldn’t tell you for sure that it’s Window 96. Kind of a random thought, but it did jog some repressed memories from a couple upperclassmen trying to explain to me what OS’es were. I do recognize most of the file types that I was able to see though, seems like not much have changed since the dinosaur ages because a lot of these extensions are still around (either that or .txt and .wav are actually really new and the people behind the site didn’t want to admit that their dinosaur aged OS didn’t support these). That being said though… it could very well be that I didn’t dig deep enough, and had I done so I could’ve found a bunch of fossilized extensions from the BC eras.
Little Feminist Theory in Practice:
This one, I can answer with a bit more personal experiences because it seems like the people in ‘power’ when it comes to the evolution of technology is well…the rich people. When the exhibit highlighted the emergences of Smart Homes, and even before that the “Computer Revolution”, the silent words being uttered in the back is well… “but only if you can afford it”. The evolution of digital technology has made it so easy for folks to gain access to information, but that’s if and only if these folks can afford the digital technologies that had just evolved. Though the archive highlighted a lot of goods that technology has bring to the world, I wonder if that same advancement is causing a greater economical divide between the able and those that aren’t. Historically speaking…hasn’t it always been the folks with money that benefitted, while the rest of us kind of just fall further and further behind?