Ahmad Dahlan Hafizh

(Not) a chill guy.

Original prompt (click to expand) Write a 750 word reflection on digital literacy from the perspective of a 20 year old university student at a liberal arts university. Include strategies they might already know how to employ in their daily and academic lives for content creation, social interaction, as well as any platforms or software they use for research data management as well as data manipulation and analysis. Consider the different skill sets in the room given all the interdisciplinary majors ( in different fields such as Computer Science, Interactive Media, Film and New Media, Literature or Creative Writing, Art and Art History). Reflect on how digital humanities might offer new horizons on what they are studying, how collaboration might offer new avenues for developing their “computational thinking” that is in the sense of Berry and Fagerjord (A cognitive practice involving practical wisdom and reflection on computation) and how they can learn about new ways of approaching data and the world of AI. Offer critical reflection on your current abilities, what you are what you are discovering in the course as well as what kinds of new ways of thinking you would like to explore.*


(Last edited 11 May 2025)

What is Digital Literacy? 📖

It is a person’s ability to read and engage a digital media or platform. Reading here is beyond understanding textual information (i.e alphabets), but more so towards finding, navigating, evaluating, and communicating information contained within the media. Engaging is to use that information and process it: “I’ve read this post on Instagram, what can I learn from it?” or “I want to go on a vacation to location X, where are the cool spots. Should I begin searching reviews on forums, or look at place reviews on (a digital) map?” Such spark in the person’s mind is a result of the person’s ability to digest informations stored within a digital media and process it to produce a desirable outcome.

(To be) Literate 💬

A person’s digital literacy partially is influenced by their proficiency in computational thinking. Berry (2017) emphasizes this term as “a cognitive practice developed through a practical wisdom that emerges from action [of knowing how to do things].” When confronted by a digital media, a person is considered literate when they take procedural steps, as Berry suggest, ‘algorithmic’ and ‘computational’ (that is like a computer) to digest the information. In its essence, to be considered digital literate, a person requires both technical proficiency and critical reflection to engage with digital materials. Berry emphasizes that computational thinking is a critical skill for digital humanities, thus digital literacy. It combines technical literacy with reflective critique, enabling scholars to navigate and shape the computational landscape of modern research

Subconsciously Like A Computer 🖥️

IG Post

One thing that I noticed as I went on with the class (reflecting on the practices and assignments), is that mayhaps, being born as a person (part of a certain generation) that is constantly bathed, exposed, and breathed in digital media, my brain have automatically ‘compute’ in order for me to be able to read digital information.

For example, leaning back to the activity of reading Instagram post, what are the steps that my brain have subconsciously ran in order for me to understand this piece of information?

  • First and foremost, I know that this information is presented in a digital machine: be it a phone or computer.
  • Second, it is a digital media. There are no physical properties such as paper print.
  • Third, the text is accompanied by a digital image. Both the text and image are contained within a ‘post’, an information visualization form.
  • Fourth and so forth, based on the informations presented here, there are more steps that I can take. By navigating the digital screen, I can ‘like’, ‘share’, or ‘comment’, distinct actions that I could perform based on experience (practical wisdom: I know what button or icon to press because previously I tried pressing on them and it prompted me for an action).
    The steps above are subconsciously running in my mind when I come across digital information. I believe, my exposure to digital media since early childhood developed a deep understanding of how to operate, read, and engage with the materials.

Then, what does it mean for me to be fluent in digital literacy? As a 20-year-old university student at a liberal arts institution, I find myself at the intersection of digital fluency and critical inquiry. Both aspect are important for me to look at both sides of the picture. It allows me to look at an information and take my time to think: “Is this relevant?” or “What opinion does the other side have?” or “Based on this information, what can I learn from it?” In essence, I am being responsible for everything that I stumble across in present-day digital world.

Tinkering my Texts ⚒️

What does it mean to process the digital information? Before we talk about processing digital information, let’s begin by talking about digital humanities.

In simple terms, a digital humanities work is the practice of using computational methods with human materials. The research materials may be analog or born digital, and the integration with computational methods depends upon decisions at every stage of a project’s design (Drucker 2021).

The article above specifically mentions of working from a non-digitized materials to a digital form.The work is categorized in three components: Materials, that are converted to digital forms. Process, the use of computational tools and methods to extract data from the materials. Lastly, Presentation, to display the outcome in a human manner, typically done using websites.

In class, we learned new frontiers on processing humanities materials to a digital form, and apply our understanding of digital literacy to it. As an example, Voyant Tools is one of the tools that we learnt which allows us to read materials without having to closely read with the materials beforehand. This practice is considered ‘distant reading’, a practice of reading that gathers large amounts of materials and use computational tools (such as Voyant) to produce textual analysis of these texts (Adwetewa-Badu 2022).

Voyant Cinemas and Cities

For me, in the context of academics, distant reading has helped me create a context mind map of my class readings. After having closely read them, by using Voyant Tools, I was able to gain general context of all the reading we’ve done so far. In exchange, I was also able to see small information that I might have missed during my close reading.

Negotiating Futures with AI: Tool or Beyond? 🤖

After having exposed to new digital research tools, I realize that there are more ways to engage with digital information than just ‘read’ them, literally. One of the common goals of Digital Arts and Humanities work is in the realms of digitatlization + preservation of analog materials. We learned how tedious and consuming work for researchers to be able to digitize these materials. But in doing so, we are also presented with a dilemma: as we process materials further and further, we are bound to ‘wash off’ some of its properties, potentially degrading its intention and meaning in the future.

In the second half of the class, we start to incorporate AI to help us with our work for textual, visual, and textual-visual data. On my first exploration (Zanzibar Gazette) with various AI tools, I come to the conclusion that their capabilities are still very much limited to the materials they are trained with. As such, when posed with a new problem usually we get undesired outputs. In other words, our current AI technologies are miles away from doing humanities work without human intervention. What truly surprised me was the last assignment: working with image corpus and AI recognition models, not in a way I expected.

… in reading a corpus of visual culture through a neural network, we are always also doing the reverse. Impett & Offert in There Is a Digital Art History

While Drucker questions the legitimacy of Digital Art and Impett & Offert offer a new perspective on the nature of ‘art’ itself, in my last assignment I raised a moral question instead. By using Distant Viewing methods presented by Arnold as a method to look into an image corpus of Studio Ghibli images, we can see how AI interpretted them. The outcome of the assignment is to be expected: that the older models can only recognize resemblance to whatever they were trained on (which I assume were classical paintings).

My current outlook on this is simple: If the older models are not capable to recognize them, at some point in the future, they must have trained the newer models using these images. Thus, if it (newer models) were trained on these images, their methods of inquiry should be questioned.

Closing Remarks

But the bread and butter is not about the intellectual property breach. It is the reason as to why we enforce on doing it. In a recent TED talk, Tristan Harris brought up a very important remark:

Unlike any other tool, an AI advances other brances of knowledge equally.

Ultimately, this course allows me to reflect on our action with new technology. They are essentially tools. Depending on how, what, where, we use it, the outcome can be wonderland or terror valley. Should we maximize our profits, dismissing ‘safety’ protocols, or should we raise concerns by prioritizing ‘morality’ over gains? As the user of the tool, the choice is ours, and the future is for us–too. Ultimately, it comes full circle: a user can only think critically about this issue if they have sufficient digital literacy to grasp its context and significance.

A DLN Post by Ahmad Dahlan Hafizh

Resources

  • Adwetewa-Badu, Ama Bemma . Distant Reading: A Discussion with Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu. 22 May 2022, newbooksnetwork.com/distant-reading.
  • Arnold, T., & Tilton, L. (2023). Distant Viewing: Theory. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14046.001.0001
  • Berry/Fagerjord, “On the Way to Computational Thinking,” Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in the Digital Age, 2017, 40-59
  • Drucker, Johanna. The Digital Humanities Coursebook an Introduction to Digital Methods for Research and Scholarship. London New York Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021.
  • Harris, T. (2025, May 1). _Why AI Is Our Ultimate Test and Greatest Invitation Tristan Harris TED_. YouTube; TED. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kPHnl-RsVI
  • Impett, L., & Offert, F. (2022). There Is a Digital Art History. Visual Resources, 38(2), 186–209. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2024.2362466