Wow, last week I was surprised that it was October. Now just a week later, I’m shocked to see we’re half-way through October. It feels as if it was just last week that I was stressing over my Economics class (which to be fair I’m still doing) and trying to get all of my books and tech together for the semester. I’ve stated before in blog posts that this is my last true semester. In the spring semester I have two classes online, an internship, Japanese and then my study abroad trip to Japan. So, this semester truly is my last one, next year I’ll have a few grad classes left and I’ve found them a bit easier even then most of my undergrad classes. That’s more then likely because I’ve found these classes much more interesting, I’ve felt I learned more real life skills with my MA classes, and this week was no different.
There was a large emphasis on language in these readings and that was one thing that really interested me. I find myself incredibly interested by languages, and how they evolve. My biggest example is of course, going to be Japan. Japan for a very long part of its history was trying its best to emulate China who they saw as a perfect civilization to strive for. In the early days of the Japanese court, Chinese was the preferred language, and the one that saw the most use amongst the men. Women, however, developed their own writing style as they wanted a way to communicate with each other in the court. Many great pieces of literature were written in this ‘womens’ language which was called hiragana, and is a writing system still used to this day. They also, stole Kanji, the symbol system from China as well. And of course, old Japanese is harder to read then current Japanese, and words can have different meanings. So, someone who reads Japanese today wouldn’t have automatically easy time reading old Japanese documents.
This, translated to Digital Humanities, means that it becomes more and more important to not only have all information available to everyone in their own language, but also to make sure the translation from the older languages are correct. For example, an early copy of the Nihon Shiki and the Kojiki which are the oldest written Japanese history books, could be written primarily in Chinese, which were then written in the new hiragana and traditional Japanese. If they didn’t make efforts to update the text, we could have lost out on the original text. Translating this to current day Digital Humanities, it is encouraging to see that the cross-disciplinary approach is helping to ensure that languages are being properly represented. This also extends to making sure everyone has access to archives and the information is readable in their own language. I also know from experience that translations from one language to another is even more difficult that it may seem at first. The intricate details of translation and making sure everything is available to everyone has been interesting to learn about. Accessibility is always going to be the most important aspect of Digital Humanities as a whole to me, it’s what I’ve taken as the biggest key to the discipline expanding.
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