Sampling and Repurposing

Hello Everyone!
I have recently finished my final paper for Digital Humanities. This paper is on music production and how sampling is a key part to, not only the music industry, but to communities and human culture as a whole. By building musical communities, people will learn more about music production and what goes on behind the scenes. Maybe this paper will inspire people to look into digital music production because, who knows, music might be a calling.

The Use of Bots in Society

Enclosed in the link below is the link to my final paper, on how bots can be used to benefit society.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wvT1R1hzKSOOd2oqETyCjXtBCCo1DdtWmz7syS6RN70/edit?usp=sharing

The paper outlines a basic definition of bots, and a few real life examples. They show how bots can be used not only for entertainment, but to also show that they can be used in a practical sense too. The interaction of humans and technology has already benefited from the use of bots, and as the technology increases, we can only assume that the bridge between humans and bots will be gapped even more.

Final Exhibits

During the week of exhibits, the students displayed their final projects for everyone to see. While they were all noteworthy, there were two that stuck out in my mind.

With Bailyn's building blocks of Digital Humanities, she outlined the entire course from start to finish. While it not only reviewed the topics we discussed in class, it also served as a reminder for how much we really did this semester and how much we really learned. She started from the very beginning, and worked up until the very end of the class, following the class schedule and assigned readings. While she mainly focused on hyperlinks, the prezi was able to show so much more than them. It was nice to see all of the work that was put in to the entire year, all wrapped up in a single presentation.

Morgan's presentation of the technology of how doctor's can see the body was a very eye-opening experience. It showed how with increasing technology, doctors can now operate and direct surgeries without even looking at their patient. They are accurate enough to reproduce the images of

the body and present them as a sort of hologram. While scans and x-rays can produce images of the body now, they are only 2-D images. With this new technology, bodies are now able to be presented in a 3-D atmosphere, with all of the defects included.

Social Media's Effects on its Users

The final project for digital humanities consisted of a brief presentation that summarized what I wanted to write about. For this part of the project, I created a Prezi because of its user-friendly and interactive nature. My project is essentially about social media and how it affects its users.

Every day, millions of people use outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Different demographics are a part of this, but I really tried to focus on comparing and contrasting younger people with older age groups to show the differences in effects.

Older demographics are drawn more towards Facebook because it is so user-friendly, and because of this, the younger demographic on Twitter and Instagram is much larger. Twitter, an immediate news-sharing website, and Instagram, a photo and video-sharing website, draw in younger groups because of their instantaneous media sharing. Here is a link to my project.



-Alex

Bailyn's Final

My final paper is about how important hyperlinks are for this class and everyday life.  Throughout the paper, the history, examples, and future of hyperlinks will be addressed.  Hyperlinks are something that we used a lot in this class, and they stood out as a very important aspect to take away from this class.  My original work of electronic literature relates to the importance of hyperlinks by presenting the 14 weeks with their hyperlinks and materials from the course.  The 14 weeks are represented as the building blocks of digital humanities.  As one explores the Prezi, they will gain a recap of the important topics of this class, and an analysis of what I took away from each week.  After creating and displaying my multimedia component in class, I walked around to view the work of my classmates.  

During the last couple days of Digital Humanities, we spent the time in class collaborating our ideas and viewing each other's multimedia components.  All of the pieces that I looked at were very interesting. However, the two that I was most interested in were actually two of my tribe members.  The first one related to a bot, and it showed how bots are becoming more present in today's society.

 The example on the Prezi was how bots can be used to automatically fill in important information from emergency responder calls.  The bots will act as documentation assistance for the busy first responders who put their lives on the line each and every day.  The second multimedia component that I viewed focused on sampling and repurposing.  They took multiple different parts of a jazz songs and merged them together to create a whole new work of art.  In class we talked about this and the question of who owns the new work??  I was confused about this question until I saw it first hand, and now it is clear that the new author is the one who should be given ownership of work.  The individual told me about all of the time and effort they put into working on this piece, and after hearing the original piece versus the second, you cold tell it was a completely different song.  This is actually something we hear everyday on the radio.  Artists are always taking sections of other songs and working it into their own work, and it wasn't until this class that I got to see the repurposing being done first hand.

Final Project Exhibit

In preparation for the final project in digital humanities, the class viewed each others' final project ideas in attempt to peer-review and receive feedback before the final due date of the essay. During this exhibit, members of the class walked around as owners of the project presented a brief description of their projects on computers as the viewers critiqued the projects.

I presented via use of a Prezi, making sure to just skim over the most important points of my essay. The projects that I was able to view were similar in presentation; Prezi was used frequently because of its user-friendly layout and interactive components.

One essay presentation focused on the merging of social media and politics as well as younger generations' use of social media and its impact on their political awareness. Within this essay, the influence of Twitter bots, the sharing of articles, and the influence news sources have on social media users.

Similarly, another project I viewed was all about bots and whether or not meaning can be made from the material they produce. The bots that were included in this presentation primarily consisted of Twitter bots. The final project I viewed was about hypertext media. Within this project, the author was creating a project about the importance of hyperlinks and their history as well as their influence on digital culture.

The Swiss Army Knife of the Digital World

As humans and society evolves, technology follows in tow. With the progression of technology, producers are creating products that are multi-functional yet incapable of performing all tasks that are desired or required by their consumers. We are not incapable of producing technology that cannot perform, or converge, all of our tasks; the companies that create these products make them in such a way that renders society dependent on needing more, thus buying more.

Henry Jenkins

Convergence, in Layman's terms, is when different forms of media, or mediums, come together into one singular medium. Henry Jenkins explains convergence in his article "Convergence Culture" without necessarily defining convergence; Jenkins offers multiple examples of convergence within modern culture, allowing his readers to better understand the idea more personally. In his article, Jenkins discusses his coined term "black box," or the all-encompassing term for technology that is literally a black box-- the TV, DVD player, gaming systems, or technology of the sort. These black boxes are being converged, or combined, into simpler devices to make life more efficient and less cluttered for its users. It is theorized, however, that there will not be one singular black box to perform all tasks.

"We can see the proliferation of black boxes as symptomatic of a moment of convergence: because no one is sure what kinds of functions should be combined, we are forced to buy a range of specialized and compatible devices," this is directly from Jenkins's article in his discussion about his idea of the black box. Furthermore, if a company such as Apple created a singular black box, it would eliminate the necessity for other products or even other technology companies. Until then, however, we are left with all of our unnecessary black boxes left to converge over other various media such as, the television, Internet, and any form of technology that requires advancement.