https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/author/sdunn/Recent content in Sdunn on Journal of Digital HumanitiesHugoen-USFri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-3/review-of-orbis-project-by-stuart-dunn/Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-3/review-of-orbis-project-by-stuart-dunn/<p>Quantitative methods matter in the digital humanities, and are coming to play an ever more prominent role in their discourse. This is driven, in part, by a great increase in interest in simulation modelling. Often borrowing methods and software from social scientists, who use them to interrogate vast datasets on populations, historians and archaeologists are coming to use quantitative tools to model historic scenarios. The use of simulation modelling in history and archaeology is still regarded as something of a ‘dark art’ in many quarters. After all, the purpose of historical or archaeological enquiry is to reconstruct the past from evidence, be that evidence textual or material. Simulation, on the other hand, begins with evidential parameters and builds ‘could-be’ hypotheses, which are in some way credible, upon them. Such hypotheses cannot be tested or reproduced from other data, and as such — as methods of understanding the past — they are usually treated as a means to the end of interpretation, not an end in themselves.</p>