What occurs when a Criminology and Prison Justice main takes a Spiritual Research class? Effectively, for
Drake Jones, a brand new main and new views had been in retailer.
Drake, certainly one of our majors anticipating to graduate this fall (and a trombone participant within the Million Greenback Band), got here to REL for Dr. Richard Newton’s African Diaspora class within the Spring of 2023. With this class, he contributed considerably to the continuing effort to digitize and analyze information associated to the Decoding Diaspora undertaking. He particularly labored on the historic limits of identification and race classifications. The following semester, Drake took Dr. Newton’s Comparative Scriptures class, the place he used digital instruments to research Biblezines—Bibles printed by Thomas Nelson within the early/mid 2000’s.
In these lessons, Drake was inspired to make use of quite a lot of digital instruments together with Omeka, Voyant Instruments,
Scalar, and the WayBack Machine to conduct his evaluation. However, Drake noticed potential in different instruments too. He
had expertise with Excel and Google Sheets from his time in Criminology and Prison Justice, thus he
primarily used these to formulate his information—successfully bringing a novel side to the initiatives.
However what does this should do with a level in Spiritual Research?
In doing these initiatives, Drake was ready to make use of some acquainted instruments and uncover extra purposes of
them. He gained a brand new perspective in relation to utilizing digital instruments—realizing that digital
humanities is a area with ample room for creativity.
In studying extra about artistic makes use of of seemingly mundane digital instruments, Drake thought in another way
about identification, faith, and the classification of knowledge. His artistic course of allowed Drake to broaden on
his prior information of how information works whereas integrating a brand new understanding of faith. Thus, he made
a novel contribution to ongoing initiatives, and he refined his potential to use instruments and abilities creatively.
This put up is a part of a sequence that highlights the vary of accomplishments that college students in
Spiritual Research obtain whereas on the Capstone and of their lives after commencement. All of us hear
questions like, “What are you going to do with a Spiritual Research diploma?” As this sequence makes
clear, the talents that college students develop in Spiritual Research, together with essential considering, interacting
with various viewpoints, social evaluation, and the power to speak to a number of audiences,
contribute to a broad vary of actions and careers.
