I had real trouble with finding the right text to annotate and instead chose a different text to annotate and understand how this digital annotations work. I came to this with little understanding of digital humanities as a field, because I am trained in computer science field humanities part sound like a different language to me. I do come from a generation of forum nerds and I do see the usefulness of digital annotations akin to what forums did in mid 2010s before the mass advent of social media. Forums kind of died out under the weight of minute to minute updates and fast shifting social meta. I chose the text The making of the atomic bomb to annotate as it is of great interest to me and it is easy to find on CUNY manifold. All you have to do is to type it up in the search button but I could not find the text required by assignment for the life of me and spent close to an hour trying to find it. I guess that speaks of manifolds limitations in regards to efficiency of its search engine.

My annotation was:

“Pollonium- its interesting how each country gets to name each discovered element with its namesake. US got the name almost bottom half of the periodic table.”

It is a tongue in check annotation in regards to naming convention of periodic elements and how each country races to name the most. US named the most radioactive bunch on the bottom of periodic table since it was the leader in atomic research thus discovering unstable elements needed to produce an atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons are hot topic again since the end of cold war, and it is important to know their history and with history comes the context of what we are talking about. I guess that is one of missions of digital humanities to spread the gospel of humanities through digital means and to stir up conversations in the general populace, and if we do not that we are at the precipice to be relegated to the dreadful academic elite which became an insult in this day and age.

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