Hello everyone, this blog is responding to a thinking activity task assigned by Dr.dilip.barad sir. As a part of my Digital Humanities study,
I got a chance to experience three different activities which helped me look at literature from new and exciting perspectives. Each activity was unique, but all of them showed me how technology and literature can work together.
Activity 1: Click-Activity – Setting and Atmosphere in Novels
In this activity, I explored how Charles Dickens and Jane Austen create their fictional worlds using setting and atmosphere. By using the CLiC tool and comparing keywords, I could see differences between the two authors. For example, Austen’s novels often highlight relationships, happiness, manners, and social gatherings, while Dickens focuses on city life, working conditions, and physical details like body parts or objects in the environment.
For me, it was very interesting to see how words themselves reveal themes. I realised that literature is not only about reading the story but also about looking at the language closely. This activity helped me understand how authors build their worlds and how social and historical contexts shape their writing.
Activity 2: What if Machines Write Better Poems than Humans?
I reflected on a thought-provoking question: What if machines can write better poems than humans? At first, it sounded strange, but today when AI can generate poems, it is a real possibility.
I even took a quiz where I had to guess whether a poem was written by a machine or a human. Surprisingly, it was not easy to tell the difference. This made me wonder: if machines can create poems that sound humane, then what makes human creativity special? This activity opened my mind to the role of technology in art and made me realise how the boundaries between humans and machines are slowly blurring.
Activity 3: Voyant Tools – Analysing Dickens’s Hard Times
For the third activity, I used Voyant Tools, which is an online platform for text analysis. I uploaded Dickens’s novel Hard Times and explored it through visualisations like word clouds, bubble maps, and trend graphs. Words like said, Mr, Bounderby, and Gradgrind stood out clearly, showing me how often they appeared and how important they are in the novel.
It was fascinating to see literature presented visually, with data and patterns instead of only sentences and paragraphs. I realised that digital tools can give us a new kind of reading experience, where we notice patterns and repetitions that we might miss in normal reading.
Learning Outcomes
These three activities together gave me a deeper understanding of what Digital Humanities really means. From them,
learned: Literature can be studied with data tools – Keywords, word clouds, and frequency charts reveal patterns that normal reading might overlook.
Technology challenges human creativity – Machines can now write poems, raising questions about originality, imagination, and the future of art.
Critical reading becomes richer with digital methods – Instead of replacing traditional reading, these tools add new layers to our interpretation.
Interdisciplinary learning – Digital Humanities connects literature, history, and technology, showing how they can support each other.
Conclusion
My journey through these activities was both exciting and eye-opening. I experienced literature in a new way, not just as words in a book but as patterns, data, and even as a dialogue with machines. These activities taught me that Digital Humanities is not only about reading texts but also about exploring how technology changes the way we create, analyse, and understand literature.
References:
barad, dilip. “What if Machines Write Poems.” 2017. https://blog.dilipbarad.com/2017/03/what-if-machines-write-poems.html . Accessed 30 September 2025.
Thank You!
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