Always Growing and Always Learning

My latest endeavor in the world of the digital humanities was confusing but also really fun after I got started. This is an original work of electronic literature, and more specifically,it is a hypertext narrative. I hope you are able to follow the narrative and can get something from my sort of story/sort of insight on growing.

-Alex 

Original E-Lit

Hey guys,

Feel free to take a look at my original work of E-lit, "The Job You Hate to Love." It's about some significant moments during the journey of my career in the fire service to date. It starts at my first day and highlights some events chronologically, with the last event being less than a week old.

View it here.

Dreams of Death: King Heroin

Hey, Guys! Please check out my original Google Maps Essay called "Dreams of Death: King Heroin". It is about a dream I once had based off of a Heroin Epidemic back home in Harrisburg, PA.
Thank You!

Click here for Dreams of Death: King Heroin

Archiving Drugs

    For centuries, people all over the world have chased an alternate dimension, or a different state of mental capabilities through the access of drugs.  They seek another state of mind and personality to explore, no matter how detrimental to their health or well-being.  Not to mention, illegal possessions which have greater repercussions.  Essentially, only one thing has changed over all of these years, and that is the method of how drugs are prepared and used.

    Something that would be eye-opening and most likely beneficial to society is to have an archive of some of the different paraphernalia used with the drugs. It would be a great way to see not only all of the differences but also some of the similarities from the early days of drug usage to today. Some of the archaic instruments that they may have used in the early 18^th century may not even be around nowadays for people to view.

Think of it as almost the same deal as a car: in the beginning, everything was very primitive-- there was nothing fancy about anything, it was made to simply do one job and one job only. The

same can be said about drug paraphernalia. It was most likely made to be used with drugs, and throughout the years, it has been modified to look like an everyday object because of the degree of police coverage and experience with drugs. Especially with the epidemic that our country is facing these days, it would be able to help people identify possible dangerous situations and maybe even help them save someone’s life.

    The way to go about creating a drug archive would be to first obtain a domain name on the internet.  From there, find some of the older paraphernalia dating back to the 18^th century and photograph it, making the pictures appear chronologically. It could start with the original devices and show the modifications made throughout the centuries and decades leading up to present day items used in drug abuse. Not only would it open up knowledge to the types of use, but it could also serve as a reminder that it is a very real situation that occurs more than most people think.  This archive would be beneficial to everyone, but most importantly to the future of our children and the safety of our country.

December Weekend in NYC

December Weekend in NYC

Please check out my original work of electronic literature.  This is a detailed description of a weekend I spent in NYC in December of 2014.

Data Mining Our Blogs

As we make our way through digital humanities, we are learning many different tools that allow us to view our work of electronic literature in many abstract ways.  This week, we are learning about data mining.  Data mining allows us to read behind the lines of our electronic words, which reveals the frequency of our text, redundancy, etc.  The two main tools that we used were Voyant and Google Ngram Viewer, which were offered to us from Dr. Justus.  Voyant allows users to enter text into the program, where it then pulls the most frequently used words and creates a collage of words.  There are many different tools built into this program, one of which allows the viewer to watch the program draw a map of the words.  Google Ngram Viewer is a tool that shows the timeline of words within any given time frame.  This program is unique in the way that it shows how words such as 'virtual' and 'identity' have a direct correlation as well as their frequency of usage. While researching, using our first blog posts, "What is Digital Humanities?" we found some surprising information.

Based off of what we found from the results on Voyant, the Ngram tool has provided us with some insight on how some of the most popular terms have been used and have correlated historically. According to Ngram, the terms humanities and DH have peaked very little, if not at all. With DH being very situation dependent, there is no surprise there. there is only some activity on it around 1980. Human and culture, on the other hand, have shared a bit of popularity over the years. They both experienced a spike in use around the 1960's, which is around the hippy movement, when everyone really started to focus on the human movement. As humanity started to progress into the 2000's, both of the words have risen simultaneously, sharing almost the same slope for both of them.

My Relevance in Social Media

Life is tough as a young adult placed in a social setting; further worsening the situation, digitize said social setting and you have a world made up of multiple social media platforms where people from all over the world can interact. As a young adult and a user of five different social media platforms, I can say with full confidence that the "self" I portray on each website is different but also similar in some ways. 

In the article "The Self in Selfie: Identity in the Age of Social Media," the author explains how social media users portray themselves differently than they do in real life. Take a celebrity, Kim Kardashian, as an example and look at how she portrays her life on Instagram-- in every photo, everyone is always posed perfectly, their skin is always smooth with no stretch or wrinkle, and even when she is "bare-faced," she still looks perfect. 

A contrasting example of this idea is my personal Twitter account. Although two completely different platforms of social media, my Twitter account contrasts with Kim Kardashian's Instagram. My tweets are more honest and tend to be stream of consciousness that fit within a certain sarcastic narrative. In person I am quiet and I don't share my opinions unless I feel comfortable to do so. On Twitter, I share my opinions freely with my followers as well as anything that is relevant to social media culture. This starkly contrasts with Kim K's use of her social media because she filters what her followers take in while I tweet statements that directly reflect my thoughts.