In what are known as digital humanities projects, digital humanists integrate digital tools, methodologies, and computational approaches as part of their research methodology. In her article “How did they make that?” Miriam Posner aimed to highlight several major digital humanities projects that would better aid novices in recognizing and comprehending the various tools and approaches accessible. Readers can see that in most of the seven projects briefly described, digital humanists typically aim to convey their study of literary or historical texts or ideas in an organized manner, whether that manner be through an archive or a 3-D model.

First and foremost, it is quite apparent that Posner intended her post to be beginner-friendly, and I believe that she accomplished this goal admirably. While there is beauty in the vastness of the digital humanities field, it can nonetheless prove to be very intimidating for newcomers like myself. Posner’s article, however, serves as a point of reassurance since it covers some very familiar technologies that can be used in the creation of digital humanities projects, such as HTML and CSS, and provides several links for further learning and experimentation. Moreover, I especially liked how inclusive and perceptive to her audience that she was by mentioning code-free software tools like Gephi and Cytoscape. Undoubtedly, Posner placed quite a number of new software on my radar that I believe will prove useful for future endeavors.

In reading “How did they make that?” I was also able to identify that the creators of all the projects that Posner listed would have had to work with some form of source material or data. Few humanists, however, consider their source material to be data, as Posner would have pointed out in “Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction”. She explains that humanists think about data differently from scientists and social scientists since the way they engage with it is so different. Both traditional and digital humanists immerse themselves so thoroughly in their research material in order to come up with some creative interpretations that reproducible work is next to nonexistent. With the steady move to digital platforms, however, circumstances are changing, and an increasing number of humanists are encountering data management, data modeling, data specifications and dataset-related challenges, which Posner believes libraries and librarians are best suited to address.

It was quite fascinating to get a glimpse inside the minds of digital humanists in this article. In my own experience in the field of accounting, data is at the core of all operations and every conclusion made must always be supported by it. One cannot know whether the return on a company’s capital is satisfactory without first gathering the necessary data and then applying a standardized series of calculations. Since the complete opposite is the norm in digital humanities, I was better able to grasp the field’s subtleties. I also developed a newfound respect for libraries and librarians by extension, because who else could be more equipped in identifying the “correct” way to organize, for instance, photos in iPhoto in a manner that simplifies rather than complicates the analytical process for humanists? It is only natural that librarians have developed such a command over their craft, especially as it pertains to data management, that they are able to readily adapt to new media and organizational schemes in order to assist digital humanists in their creation of digital humanities projects.