A-blogging we will go.

“Humor is reason gone mad.”

~ Groucho Marx

And then came India. TourAbsurd.com was my baby, my happy place, my reason for moving forward. For four years I nurtured it, educated myself about the workings of social media, and built an international network of friends and contacts within the travel industry. After 6 six weeks in Mumbai, Goa, and Kerala, however, I was done. It was the trip that broke my wanderlust.

It seemed odd that it should evaporate – *poof!* – just like that, but there you have it. The quiet that seeped in to fill the void was only disconcerting in that it was …not at all disconcerting. I felt I should be more upset by the absence of something I’d used define myself for so many years. Yet I was secretly content. I knew whatever came next would be great.

Time passed.

The main quadrangle of University College Cork

Since you ask, I’ve enrolled in a Master’s program at University College Cork, pursuing a postgrad degree in digital arts and humanities. It’s an eclectic discipline that means different things to different people. One of our inaugural classes offered up the following:

What is Digital Humanities?

1. Humanistic scholarship presented in digital forms
2. Humanistic scholarship enabled by digital methods and tools
3. Humanistic scholarship about digital technology and culture
4. Humanistic scholarship building and experimenting with digital technology
5. Humanistic scholarship critical of its own digital-ness

Much like my long-ago undergraduate degree in Multimedia, DAH allows those with eclectic tastes to pick, choose, edit, create, and reform elements of many disparate disciplines. To quote Fatboy Slim, “You can blow with this or you can blow with that.” In my case this means a dissertation incorporating elements of film production, feminism and equality, general geekery, the quest for accuracy, and cultural curiosity, all topped off with a dash of hoodoo. (Not really. I just wanted to say “hoodoo”.)  It’s amorphous and burgeoning with potential, which is just the way I like it. Origin stories are the best.

Oh, and this blog? It’s an assignment. It’s also the reason for the opening quote. I thought I had blissfully broken free of blogging in order to jump feet-first into academia. Third assignment of the course? Set up a blog.

From here on out, there will be content curation, musings, fiddling with lens adjustments, and sometimes puns. Because no matter how intellectual things may get, I am a sucker for puns. Humani-teas, ho!