Update on Transitioning from Perfection to Passion
Elise Freeman, the Humanities Correspondent, has penned an insightful article titled "From Perfection to Passion: Getting Involved in STEM". In the piece, she discusses her personal journey of reconciling her love for STEM with her humanities major.
Fear of math has long been a hurdle for Freeman, but by taking one STEM course a semester, she is consistently confronting this fear. She finds that developing quantitative thinking skills is not only beneficial for her work but also helping to silence the voice in her head that discourages her from pursuing challenges.
This year, Freeman made a compromise to take at least one quantitative course a semester. This fall, she will be taking Intro to Data Science as part of this commitment. Her new interest lies in Digital Humanities, a field that combines humanities and technology.
Digital Humanities (DH) is an interdisciplinary field that uses digital technologies to research, analyze, teach, and publish humanities topics. It fosters collaborative, transdisciplinary projects that often include digitization, digital archives, multimedia, data analysis, and digital editions of texts, moving beyond print as the primary medium for knowledge.
Combining Digital Humanities with a French major can be highly complementary. It offers ways to digitally archive and analyze French literary texts, create multimedia digital projects, use text mining and natural language processing tools on French corpora, and collaborate on digital humanities projects engaging French digital culture or francophone studies.
Freeman's article also discusses mentorship in research and "The Writing Process". However, it does not mention any new fears or intellectual boundaries she is pushing, nor any new quantitative skills she is developing. Instead, she sees this compromise as a step in pushing her intellectual boundaries and hopes to prime her quantitative side to explore Digital Humanities, potentially for her senior thesis.
Freeman's article is a testament to the power of embracing new challenges and the potential they hold for personal and academic growth. It serves as an inspiration for those who, like her, are seeking to bridge the gap between seemingly disparate fields and push their intellectual boundaries.
[1] Digital Humanities Now (n.d.) What is Digital Humanities? Retrieved from https://dhnow.org/what-is-digital-humanities/
[2] University of Oxford (n.d.) Digital Humanities at Oxford. Retrieved from https://www.humanities.ox.ac.uk/digital-humanities
[4] University of California, Los Angeles (n.d.) Digital Humanities. Retrieved from https://dhlab.ucla.edu/
[1] Elise Freeman's senior thesis might delve into data-and-cloud-computing aspects of Digital Humanities, given her interest in Intro to Data Science.
[2] The blend of technology and education-and-self-development, as seen in Digital Humanities, could be a fruitful ground for Freeman's personal-growth, particularly in silencing her inner fears and fostering quantitative skills.
[3] By incorporating Digital Humanities into her French major, Elise Freeman intends to encourage learning and innovation, taking her beyond traditional printed knowledge mediums for a more comprehensive education experience.
