Explore

This webpage you are currently reading will serve as a means of documentation for myself; within my digital archive you will find my documented observations, thoughts, and conclusions from my time in the Humanities Core series. 

As I am writing this, during the fall quarter, I consider myself to be a novice humanistic researcher. At this point, I have scarcely collected materials related to worldbuilding— such as my experience with playing video games and watching a variety of films. By the end of spring, I hope to have expanded my horizons through Humanities Core; I anticipate exploring the classics, fictional novels, and historical artworks amongst all else. By exploring a wider range of "materials" that is normally outside my comfort zone, I hope to challenge myself and become better versed in humanities as a subject. In other words, I hope to become a confident and experienced humanistic researcher at the end of this course series.

With that said, this webpage will be my very own digital archive— where I will collect and store my experiences from Humanities Core. Here I will reflect upon my documentations and track my own progress throughout the year, and hopefully, I will notice my own growth as both a humanistic researcher and as a person. 

As described by Jonathan Alexander in Humanities Core Handbook: Worldbuilding 2023-2024, "Worldbuilding is the overarching term that describes human activity in imagining, creating, shaping, and altering environments in which people live" (1). Though I believe this definition encompasses the term "worldbuilding" quite well, I would like to add on to it and broaden its application. 

Let us first ask ourselves this question: do people only reside in physical or literal worlds? Personally I would say no— people, especially in our day and age, are definitely not limited to living in a non-fictional world. Fictional worlds in all its forms has many inhabitants; whether it be those who immerse themselves in a faraway lands within a storybook, or those who enjoy exploring a fantasy realm in an open-world video game. Regardless of what fictional world people reside in, they have the same ability to partake in worldbuilding as those living in a literal environment. Hence, in order to clearly broaden the term's application, it should be explicitly stated within the definition that the term "worldbuilding" applies to both literal and fictional worlds. 

With that in mind, I would like to share my own definition of the term; I believe "worldbuilding" is used to refer to the process or ability in which an individual is able to fabricate or influence the world around them— whether this world is literal or fictitious.