https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/author/towens/Recent content in Towens on Journal of Digital HumanitiesHugoen-USThu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/defining-data-for-humanists-by-trevor-owens/Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/defining-data-for-humanists-by-trevor-owens/<p>Data seems to be the word of the moment for scholarship. The National Endowment for the Humanities and a range of other funders are inviting scholars to “dig data” in their <a href="http://www.diggingintodata.org/" title="Site of the Digging Into Data Challenge">“Digging into Data” grant program</a>. Data itself is now often discussed as representing a <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/4th_paradigm_book_complete_lr.pdf" title="PDF of publication by Microsoft Research entitled 'The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery' edited by Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Toll. ">fourth paradigm for scientific discovery and scholarship</a> (PDF). What is a humanist to do in such a situation? Does data, in particular big data, require humanists to adopt a new methodological paradigm? Or, are the kinds of questions humanities scholars traditionally have explored through close reading and hermeneutic interpretation relevant to big data? In this brief essay I suggest some of the ways that humanists already think about and analyze their sources can be employed to understand, explore, and question data.</p>https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/conversations/please-write-it-down-by-trevor-owens/Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/conversations/please-write-it-down-by-trevor-owens/<p><a href="http://nataliacecire.blogspot.com/2011/11/such-blogging-fail.html" title="Natalia Cecire, 'Such Blogging Fail,' Storified Twitter comments">Tom Scheinfeldt provocatively suggested</a> that “DH arguments are encoded in code” and that he disagrees “with the notion that those arguments must be translated / re-encoded in text.” I don’t think this is how this works.</p> <p>What I see as the key issue is not so much whether digital humanists need to “re-encode” their work in writing. Digital humanists, like reflective designers of all stripes, are already doing a lot of writing. They are creating documentation, making wireframes, etc. The question here is: what kinds of writing should humanities scholars who design software and make things in code be doing?</p>