Week 4

This week’s readings were challenging in various ways. I struggle to remember exact terms or rules from readings, and focus more on the overall concepts and themes, which wasn’t directly compatible with the quick quiz questions in class. The readings have a large range in terms of topic and focus, so it helps to connect the overarching concepts together. Each reading also introduces a large, often improvised or new vocabulary the author has used to make sense of the concepts they are explaining, which is useful for building an epistemological structure for digital studies but not as useful in a fast-paced class like this where quick integration and application of those concepts is more essential than memorization of specific terms those concepts were referred to by a particular author, which tends to happen gradually and with longer-term engagement with each term, at least for me, and its hard to maintain that memory with weekly introduction of large vocabulary sets. So that is still a challenge for me while reading.

Other than that, i had some confusions this week about the prompt for Hack#2 as I brainstormed and finalized my idea. Some students brought it up in class so its clearer now, but the confusion was mainly related to the extent of physical expected in the hack. The prompt allows for some significant critical interventions with very little manipulation of artifacts, but that seemed somehow undesirable in a Davidson courseload.