Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This paper is about data in the humanities.¹ Most of my colleagues in literary and cultural studies would not necessarily speak of their objects of study as “data.” If you ask them what it is they are studying, they would rather speak of books, paintings and movies; of drama and crime fiction, of still lives and action painting; of German expressionist movies and romantic comedy. They would mention Denis Diderot or Toni Morrison, Chardin or Jackson Pollock, Fritz Lang or Diane Keaton. Maybe they would talk about what they are studying as texts, images, and sounds. But rarely would they consider their objects of study to be “data.” However, in the humanities just as in other areas of research, we are increasingly dealing with “data.” With digitization efforts in the private and public sectors going on around the world, more and more data relevant to our fields of study exists, and, if the data has been licensed appropriately, it is available for research.² The digital humanities aim to raise to the challenge and realize the potential of this data for humanistic inquiry. As Christine Borgman has shown in her book on Scholarship in the Digital Age, this is as much a theoretical, methodological and social issue as it is a technical issue.³

DARIAH-EU’s Virtual Competency Center on Research and Education

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Poster

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Abstract

DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts in Humanities — http://dariah.eu) is a large-scale, long-term, pan-European endeavor aiming to enhance and support digitally-enabled research across the arts and humanities. DARIAH aims to develop and maintain an infrastructure in support of ICT-based research practices. It will explore and apply ICT-based methods and tools to enable new research, improve research opportunities through linking distributed digital source materials and tools, and exchange expertise, methodologies, and practices across domains and disciplines.

Cschoch on Journal of Digital Humanities

Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities

DARIAH-EU’s Virtual Competency Center on Research and Education

Poster

Abstract