What is Digital Humanities?

 

As a Digital Humanist, I have often been asked the above question. At the centre of Digital Humanities is the digitisation of humanities and the humanisation of the digital. Critical questions to Digital Humanists are Can the digital be humanised or Can humanities be digitalised? Reflecting on these two interrogative expressions, Digital Humanities is the practice of digital creation and/or digital analysis and critique of digital texts. It is understanding of how digital technologies change research infrastructures and practices in humanities. The discipline centres on the use of digital models to research what it means to be human. It means critically engaging with questions of knowledge formation, dissemination, and preservation. The field focus on the creative application of digital technology to humanities questions and data.

It uses digital tools to explore, investigate, and interpret the human condition through time and space.Digital Humanities is all the ways that the humanities and digital technologies intersect.

What sets Digital Humanities apart is its genuine interdisciplinarity, its permanent emergence, and its open communication.

It carries out the kind of analysis that would be very difficult or impossible to do without the use of technology.

Digital Humanities is using technology for humanities research, teaching, and publication

It involves de-siloing scholarship in that same field through a collaboratively authored academic wiki.Digital Humanities is tools that help scholars and practitioners consider both broad swaths of creative endeavor. It is the intersection of computing and the arts.

The discipline has an artificial intelligence flair in that it is the attempt to create smarter machines and to teach people how to be smarter than the intelligent machines we create.Digital Humanities is the application of computational technology and approaches to traditional and novel problems in the social sciences and humanities.It is researchers creating new digital materials, tools, or methods in the humanities.

Digital Humanities GIVE NEW ANSWERS to old research questions using new resources, REVISIT its postulates under the light of the new methodologies, DEVELOP new forms of sharing knowledge. Digital Humanities are intersectional activities commonly convergent on ever evolving computational technologies. It is the use of digital methods to research what it means to be human.Digital Humanities means that we must build tools, technologies, methodologies, and theories that represent this disruptive force. It is the engagement and practice of the humanities with and through digital technologies. 

What is often abbreviated as DH is a discipline called Digital Humanities allowing people a new possibility to access knowledge and in turn generates new knowledge. It supports the discovery of new access paths to the yet unknown and unthinkable. The field affords people new ways to distribute and publish our work and how we can analyze and manipulate information. The discipline promotes hands on experience as an important way of learning. The best way to describe DH is the intersection between human cognition and computing. It is the study of the Humanities through methods and with perspectives arising from the application of digital procedures.

The field designate a 'transdiscipline'. In other words, it is interdisciplinary in scope and methodological in nature. Digital Humanities sits on the crossing vertices of genuine interdisciplinarity and continual emergence of new practices. It is a gathering term for scholars who embrace technology as a means to explore humanities material as data. Digital Humanities is an umbrella term that covers a wide variety of digital work in the humanities. It is building, collaborating, learning and sharing.Scholars and students of DH explore the benefits computing tools, applications, and softwares offer the field of Humanities. It entails trying to offer informed guidance to the historians, linguists, literary critics, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, artists, lawyers, bankers, economists, managers, marketers, political scientists, etc. who want to use digital research tools (but can't build them).The thoughtful use of computing in humanistic inquiry and the thinking through of computing from the perspective of the traditions of the humanities.DH are disciplines of humanities developed through digital computing. It is taking people to bits.

The field is offered at University of Zimbabwe as a postgraduate programme and it is the first to be offered in Africa. The discipline has long been studied in Europe, Asia and America in top institutions such as Cambridge University, MIT, Stanford University etc. Interestingly, America has more than 65 Digital Humanities Centres (DHCs), Britain has 19 DHCs, Japan has more than 10 DHCs, China has more than 7 DHCs, etc driving digital innovations in these geographic spheres. Disturbingly, Africa has less than 2 DHCs. It is in this context that we have launched an MA in Digital Humanities at University of Zimbabwe, a postgraduate degree driven by the fourth industrial revolution. It centres on digitising humanities and humanising the digital. It's interdisciplinary in scope and methodological in nature. It's a hands-on or practically oriented degree. This makes it a money making degree because each skill acquired is a job or business in itself. Apply for MA in Digital Humanities for University of Zimbabwe 2023 February intake. 

Do you want to be an expert in the following DH areas? 

1) Content Management Systems 

2) Big Data Analytics

3) Text & Data Mining

4) Social Media Analytics

5) Digital Storytelling

6) Digital Repositories 

7) Data Visualization 

8) Computation & Programming

9) Digital Collections and Libraries

10) Platforms & Software

11) Image & Video Analytics

13) Mapping & Timelines

14) Web Design & Prototyping

15) Coding & Programming Resources

16) Tools/Apps/Software

17) Animation & Motion graphics

18) Project Management & Workflow

19) Open Image & Multimedia Collections 

20) CMS/Web Publishing

21) Animation & Storyboarding

22) Audio Tools 

23) Authoring/Annotation/Editing/ Publishing Platforms & Tools 

24) Interactive Fiction Writing Tools & Platforms 

25) Code Versioning Systems

26) Crowdsourcing Tools 

27) Command Line tools 

28) Exhibition/Collection/Edition Platforms & Tools 

29) Internal Research Tools

30) Mind-Mapping 

31) Simulation Tools & Platforms 

32) Corpus Linguistics Programs/Resources

33) Sentiment Analytics

34) Text Collation Tools 

35) Text Encoding Tools 

36) Text & Data Wrangling Tools

37) Text Preparation 'Recipes' for Topic Modeling Work 

38) Topic Modeling Tools 

39) Video & Film Analytics Tools

40) Diagramming & Graphing Tools 

41) Infographics Tools 

42) Network Visualization Tools 

43) Deformance Tools

 44) Stylometric Analytics

Etc.

 Requirements

Any honours degree with at least a 2.2 degree class.

Contact: +263 775 896 614 for more information.

Compiled by Dr. Reggemore* Marongedze

A Digital Humanities Lecturer 

Department of History, Heritage & Knowledge Systems

University of Zimbabwe

Preparing for Exams!

Preparing for Exams Reflections

Brian Maregedze

 1. Read the material at least once without taking notes or highlighting anything. This will give you a general overview of the material, which is crucial for understanding it later on.

2. Take notes while you read, being sure to include page numbers and section headings. You should also use different colors to highlight key points and sections that are important for your exam.

3. Once you’ve finished reading, go back through your notes and highlight important information again so that it stands out when you’re reviewing later on.

4. If there are any questions that have been confusing or difficult for you, try answering them by writing them out in complete sentences before looking at the answers provided in the textbook or study guide. This will help you understand the concepts better so that they make more sense when they come up again during an exam!

5. Try using flashcards to help memorize important terms from your reading materials; this is especially effective if you can find someone else who has already studied those same flashcards with you (and then quiz them!).

Water woes, sextortion and blame game in Zimbabwe

 By Brian Maregedze

First published in 2020

As Zimbabwe's economy worsens, sextortion set in, with women and children falling victim to this form of abuse and corruption. Drinking-water scarcity is a fundamental problem authorities have unsuccessfully dealt with for years in the country. Think-tanks, analysts, politicians and the like-minded have proffered various theories to explain the scourge of water scarcity affecting many urban areas. The most prominent debate is the blame game between the ruling party Zimbabwe African National Union for the Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) and the main opposition party Movement for Democratic Change-Alliance (MDC-A). ‘The will to power dominates the will to live’ aptly captures the way political parties [mis]treat the electorate in Zimbabwe.

“I don’t go to work, got no money to take care of myself although am degreed from a prestigious local university” explains Rachel* at a borehole queue for drinking water in Unit N, Seke- Chitungwiza. Rachel is a twenty-nine-year-old lady who still hopes that possibly she can escape her current predicaments through marriage. However, she sadly disclosed how she manages to cope with the water challenges in her area by secretly having sexual relations with young men who buy and sell water. Buying a twenty litres bucket is only ZW$3.00. Averagely, each household of four to six people needs the same number of buckets, translating to a maximum of twenty dollars a day. In a week, ZW$150.00 is just for water and ZW$600.00 goes for the whole month.

A male water entrepreneur whom we shall refer to as Tonnie points out that, “There is nothing for free in Zimbabwe. Kana usina mari hauwane mvura. Kana ukandipawo poto ndiko zvifambe. (If you’re broke, no water for you. If you offer me sex, at least you can drink water)." This is just just one of many scenarios of the water scarcity situation in Chitungwiza. Sometimes to evade the long queues to buy borehole water, paying by other means is also now common. As such, sex is a currency used to bribe. However, other residents indicated that the rainfall received in 2020 is a relief since they can now survive partly outside the male-dominated water entrepreneurship route which is not affordable to ordinary people.

The International Bar Association (IBA) defines sextortion as: “A form of sexual exploitation and corruption that occurs when people in positions of authority whether government officials, judges, educators, law enforcement personnel, or employees seek to extort sexual favours in exchange for something within their power to grant or withhold. In effect, sextortion is a form of corruption in which sex, rather than money, is the currency of the bribe.”

In a report by Transparency International titled Gender and Corruption in Zimbabwe (2019:11), in Chitungwiza, Glenview and Budiriro, there is evidence of cases of women having to succumb to sextortion to get water. The same report notes that some women who don’t have money to pay bribes are forced to use sex as a form of payment. In the study, 45 percent of women indicated having received requests as bribes for sexual favours to access a service. Even though some claim water is a human right, the way it is immorally commodified is a cause for concern.

The fact that water is being sold by other means points to the decayed nature of service delivery in general. Many hours are spent on borehole queues and sometimes wells at undesignated spaces. Women and children carry the burden of waiting and expecting for better service delivery which in most cases doesn’t materialize. To the few who access tap water, it’s in many ways ghoulish. Again, the water may be available only at midnight. It’s now not an issue of wonder to see long queues of people close to midnight waiting to buy water when power is back. The sad reality of water woes can also be witnessed by the government’s desperate reaction, early January 2020, of drilling a borehole at the Parliament of Zimbabwe. Unfortunately, the poor carry the yoke of suffering.

Beyond blame game

Given this context, it’s surprising to realise that in state and non-state narratives, political parties still play blame-game rather than to address the actual water woes at hand. The reality is that the water shortages can be historically traced to poor colonial city planning. Over twenty years ago, the late history professor, David N. Beach, partially exonerated ZANU PF led government when he argued that;

Even urban planning was atrociously bad. Leaving aside the lack of thinking that left only a 45° segment of Salisbury for the African population; the very siting of the city was and is incompetent. It is well known that in 1890 the site was chosen at very short notice but what is not generally known is that in 1891 the Company (British South Africa Company [sic]) did think of resisting it, considering Norton, Mvurwi, Darwendale and even Rusape. The proposal to move the town was rejected, allegedly because the other sites were a few metres lower and thus less healthy, but actually because six brick buildings had already been put up, and the property developers did not want to lose their investments. Consequently, the town remained where the city is, upstream of its main water supply, and thus we are condemned to drink our own recycled waste! (Beach 1999: 14)

The same scholar went on to note that;

“Unfortunately, when it comes to long-term planning Homo sapiens zimbabweensis is not significantly different from H. sapiens rhodesiensis. Indeed, the two are far more alike than many, would care to concede.”

The water scarcity challenge now has a blame game tradition which has to be dispelled by all means necessary. If Zimbabwe is to work again, incompetence from all political parties exhibited in blame games should end. Forty years since the country attained its independence, the blame game narrative is all some political actors’ sleeves got to offer. Why then does history matter if humankind isn’t ready to learn from it? The Rhodesi-was-better nostalgia propagated by some academics and activists is more surprising.

D.N Beach concluded his inaugural lecture in October 1998 painting pessimism rather than optimism whenever he gave reference to population growth in Zimbabwe. Urbanisation has been more of a curse rather than a blessing equally complemented by ill-advised policy makers whether pro or anti-establishment.

Water provision was premised on racial and segregation policies with African townships relegated to the periphery in quality service provision.  It’s also a truism that all the political actors involved have proven failing to the electorate as they have all been corrupt, prone to mismanagement of funds and poor urban planners. Above that, the political actors have not addressed the problematic geographic location of Harare in water provision.

The areas being affected by water scarcity and water stress seem to be dried up more by the consistent lack of respect for wetlands or swamps. In January 2020, Minister Mangalisa Ndlovu made a chilling warning to those who continuously use the current model of so-called development in municipalities. He described the decimation of wetlands as a heist on biodiversity that risks food and water shortages as well as driving species into extinction. In twenty years, all wetlands will likely disappear, hence worsening the already dire situation the country is experiencing. Climate change is real and as such, practical corrective steps should be taken.

In 2017, Budiriro residents ‘paid dearly’ for having houses built on the wrong place. The land mafia, that is, housing co-operatives and the politicians play the bigger part in deceiving citizens. Building in wetlands to meet the housing demands has its repercussions if not well addressed. Beyond political rhetoric, reason should reign. The land audit instituted by the president, Emmerson Mnangagwa exposed how politicians use land in vote buying from within his party and outside. Failure to walk the talk in addressing these problems is testimony to those who still have hope in the leadership that it is still a mirage.

Underground water disappearance is fueled by such irresponsible behavior from the supposedly responsible authorities. The Environment Management Agency (EMA) has indications that in Chitungwiza, fourteen out of fifteen wetlands have been taken over by construction. Given this scenario, residents become the source of their problems. Wetlands are critical as they act like a sponge which absorbs water and then recharges underground water so that the water table remains high. Not only that, but wetlands also help control flooding by absorbing excess water and releasing it gradually into water bodies. As such wetlands preservation partially assist to address the changing climatic conditions. Water woes, sextortion and blame game will remain a perennial problem if citizens remain silent.

* Not her real name

For feedback, email; bmaregedze@gmail.com

 

A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Bad Beginning: Book the First, Summaries

 

Summary by Brian Maregedze

Date: 11/03/2022

A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Bad Beginning: Book the First

By Lemony Snicket

Chapter 1

The book is dedicated to Beatrice who is dead but dearest and darling to the author. The introduction of the novel takes the reader into bad circumstances taking shape in the lives of three children, Violet, Klaus and Sunny, all from the Baudelaire family. These three kids received the bad news of the death of their parents from an inferno while they were hanging out at Briny Beach. Mr. Poe delivered the sad news to the three kids which they initially received as a joke. Upon realising that Mr. Poe was telling them the truth, all the kids became sad with grief. Mr. Poe also informed the kids that he was their executor although the kids felt he was in fact an executioner for delivering bad news to them.

Yes, this is a sad chapter with a subtle character- Klaus, who contemplated on his burnt books in the library. Thoughts of how he would never read his books again linger at a time of grief.

12/03/2022

Chapter 2

Summary writing by Brian Maregedze

A series of bad events continue to unfold in the lives of three Baudelaire orphans‌ Klaus, Violet and Sunny who temporarily fall under the custody of Mr. Poe. While they were staying with Mr. Poe, sharing rooms with his two kids Edgar and Albert made life miserable since they were not used to that. Violet also expressed that they never had fun as they would always mop.

Count Olaf becomes the guardian of the three Baudelaire orphans. He lived close to where they once lived before the fire accident, which eventually killed their parents. The kids’ first impression of Count Olaf is that of discomfort and uneasiness because they liked their neighbour Justice Strauss. Mr. Poe introduced Count Olaf as an actor, although he lived in an ugly house at least according to the kids.