For my interview, I had the please with talking to John McChesney-Young, a digital humanist employed at the University of California  Berkeley art department and a avid online blogger. Mr. Young grew up in Berkeley, attended UC Berkeley and graduated with a degree in paleontology, and currently still resides there. After talking with Mr Young and informing him the purpose of my interview, I could feel the excitement and passion in his voice about digital humanities.

I started by asking Mr. Young how he got in into technology and digital humanities. I never asked for his age but from his voice and picture I would presume he had to be in his mid to late 60’s. Mr. Young informed me that once computers started becoming mainstream and the invention of the internet, he realized  technology would become a very important aspect of the future.  In 2004, Mr. Young became an active blogger online discussing various things from the problems and errors on websites to sites that can help improve your life. The project that Mr. Young and a few of his online colleagues have recently been working on finding the exploits of Internet Explore and possibly help Microsoft. Mr. Young informed me that Internet explore has so many exploits that computers can get compromised simply by visiting a malicious website, which gives an attacker/hacker the same privileges as the current user allowing him to obtain your deepest darkest secrets. As of now, Mr. Young informed me that there is no plan for a patch to be released by Microsoft and that 41% of residence who use Internet explore in North America have a chance to be hacked. So if you have internet explore, you should delete that web browser and install google chrome or firefox.

Since Mr. Young has almost been active blogger for the past ten years, I asked him how technology has advanced to help digital humanist. He informed me in the past ten years there has been a drastic change. For example he told me that in present day there are many universities, museums, or research libraries that a person can go to that have some sort of visualization theater. A visualization theater is room that has a big open dome ceiling. Normally on the ceiling there will be some sort of visuals like space  or the deep ocean, but it can also be used for scientific purposes. For example, teachers can take their students within 3D models of complex molecules, virus’s, or even DNA.  Allowing to have a 3D projection in front of you and the ability to discuss with your colleagues makes it a prime learning environment.  Apparently in 2002, University of California Los Angeles was the only facility in the nation to have a visualization theater.  Ten years later, you can find almost one in every big city if not multiples.

After talking with Mr. Young, I could tell he truly appreciated his work as a digital humanist only trying to help or improve people or software.