Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Student Projects in the Digital Humanities (2010-12)

I.                   Breaking Away

I am a twin. For a very long time now, I had been vying to be my own separate person. My parents, or anyone else in our family for that matter, have never treated us as if my twin and I are just one person. I can’t say much for other people, though. For some reason, the general public thinks that because we are identical twins—...

Academic Blogging, a Possible Genre of Digital Humanities?

Tumblr is a blogging website that allows users to post pictures, videos, links, and written pieces to a blog of their own design.  The interface is very user friendly (I can even navigate it), and it offers a variety of layouts, both free and for a price, that can help personalize each individual blog.

Along with ways of personalizing ones blog, Tumblr also has a variety of options that...

One morning in September 2011, I was in awe when my eye caught the following Al Jazeera news headline: “Scientists claim to break the speed of light”. It was a break from Einstein’s theory of special relativity that establishes the photonas the fastest particle and a break from the core laws of physics that govern the world around us. Little did I take notice of the science news article as a...

                     half a chance it is true    Wikipedia: the reasons why it is accurate

 

"no longer the sole producers, stewards, and disseminators of knowledge or culture, universities are called upon to shape natively digital models of scholarly discourse for the newly emergent public spheres of the present era." (1)

As the information age has taken hold, thoughts, views and writings have gained a wider realm of dissemination than ever before.  The internet and its databases have provided the knowledge of those who came before to all and any without a...

Academia in 140 Characters

    With all the advances in technology we have come to naming social media a genre within our writing. Social media is an instrument of communication that allows its audience to interact with one another by sharing content etc.  A website that has recently caught my attention has been Twitter due to the fact I have not used it before and know very little about it. In order to conduct my research and express my thoughts...

Of all the words I have ever used to define myself, writer has never been one of them.  Every time I write, I write for someone or something else.  I write papers for school because I’ve convinced myself that school matters, and  I write letters for Amnesty International because issues of justice are important to me.  When I first started writing this web-event, it was an assignment that I “had” to do.  During a round of revisions, I realized that I was writing for...

LITERARY KINDS: A PROCESS

"For my first paper for the course, Literary Kinds at Bryn Mawr College, I’ll be using Tumblr to do an analysis of what this blogging platform is and the ways in which it can be useful in academic work. It’s going to be crazy meta so I’m going to work hard to keep it fresh and exciting.

In line with the digital humanities, this blog will take the form of...

Our discussions this week about the transformation of writing in the humanities due to the advancement of technology really got me thinking about what it means to be "media literate". Media literacy is defined as a repertoire of competences that enable people to analyze, evaluate and create messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres and forms. As a digital humanist (woah, never used that title in "public" before), I'd make the claim that I'm not as media literate as I'd like to think...

Yeah, since I like to "bend" the rules, I'm posting about something different from academic writing within a particular discipline. :)

As I've mulled over our class discussion and the reading for the week, I've started to notice a trend. There seems to be a binary between that which is citable (so the source material) and the paper, or equivalent, that we are creating that takes from...

 A Brief look at Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach:

An Exercise in Reading and Decoding

 

Introduction:

                 

 

What’s a cyborg?

Several of the texts we have looked at during the course on Gender and Technology have put forth the idea of modern humans as cyborgs. We have become so increasingly dependent on technology over the years, from personal computers to simple things such as glasses, that writers such as Andy Clark and Donna Haraway assert that we may consider them part of ourselves rather than tools. There lines between human and machine are blurred, in other words...

                                                                                  ...

 

Books in Western Civilization were invention of the medieval period, out of necessity for Roman Catholic Christian scripture (Truitt). Prior to the widespread practice of Christianity, scrolls served the same function, allowing readers to start at the beginning, save their place mid-text, and read through to the end. For instance, in Judaism, practitioners read the religious text from beginning to end, and when they finished, they would start again. However, in...

 


  Nonsense. It is the absence of logic, the disappearance of understanding. If something completely baffles our comprehension of the universe, we cry foul of its validity. It can be frustrating. It rubs against our conventional approaches to life. At the same time, nonsense is a challenge. It forces us to encompass a different mindset, to shift our perspective past the familiar in order to...

Plot? What Plot?  And Why Do We Need One Anyway?
Adaptation Wonderland