Hello Fellow HASTACers!

When I told my roommates that I was now a HASTAC Scholar, I was met with three blank looks.

"It's an Internet thing, isn't it," one of them said flatly.

I agreed, it was an internet thing (my Internet usage is pretty legendary.)  I went on to tell them that it was also an incredible opportunity to combine my academic interests in language and literature with my interest in being online all the time. It's not like I have a background in Computer Science or even Media Studies--I'm a Chinese major, at Occidental College in LA. My current research doesn't have much to do with digital anything; I'm writing my senior comps on women and nature in Gao Xingjian's novel Soul Mountain.

Yet, my language and literature studies would have been inconceivably more difficult without the wealth of resources online. Not only that, but the Chinese web presence is the biggest in the world, with Chinese "netizens" expressing the opinions and values of modern China in a way that Chinese media cannot.

So, I consider these two spheres (the digital and the humanities, if you will) to be very much connected. That's why I'm excited about HASTAC: For even though I have three Tumblr blogs and a bunch of other social media accounts, there's  finally a place to talk about this intersection!

Speaking of which, this Thursday, Johanna Drucker is doing a talk here at Occidental about the digital humanities. She was the Digital Humanities Fellow at Stanford and is co-author of the book Digital Humanities: Theory and Practice. I'll be sure to do a post afterwards about it.

Cheers!