Big Data in the Humanities
Massive use of “Big Data” has not traditionally been a method of choice in the humanities, a field in which close reading of texts, serendipitous finds in archives, and individual hermeneutic interpretations have dominated the research culture for a long time. This “economy of scarcity” as it has been called has now been amended by an “economy of abundance,” the possibility to distance-read, interrogate, visualize, and interpret a huge number of sources that would be impossible to be read by any individual scholar in their lifetime, simultaneously by using digital tools and computational methods.
Since the mid-2000s, the latter approach is known as “Digital Humanities” (hereafter DH), in analogy to “e-Science” sometimes also as “e-Humanities,” although under the name of “Computing in the Humanities,” “Humanities Computing” or similar it has been in existence for half a century, albeit somewhat on the fringes of the Humanities canon. There are also overlaps of...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Further Readings
Berry, D. M. (Ed.). (2012). Understanding digital humanities. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Burdick, A., Drucker, J., Lunenfeld, P., Presner, T., & Schnapp, J. (2012). Digital humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fish, S. (2011, December 26). The old order changeth. Opinionator Blog, New York Times. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/the-old-order-changeth/. Accessed August 2014.
Fitzpatrick, K. (2011). The humanities done digitally. The Chronicle of Higher Education. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Humanities-Done-Digitally/127382/. Accessed August 2014.
Gold, M. (Ed.). (2012). Debates in the digital humanities. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Kirsch, A. (2014, May 2). Technology is taking over English departments: The false promise of the digital humanities. New Republic. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117428/limits-digital-humanities-adam-kirsch. Accessed August 2014.
Kirschenbaum, M. G. (2010). What is digital humanities and what’s it doing in English departments? ADE Bulletin, 150, 1–7.
McCarty, W. (2005). Humanities computing. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Nyhan, J., Flynn, A., & Welsh, A. (2012). A short introduction to the Hidden Histories project. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 6(3). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/3/000130/000130.html. Accessed August 2014.
Schreibman, S., Siemens, R., & Unsworth, J. (Eds.). (2004). A companion to digital humanities. Oxford: Blackwell.
Schreibman, S., Siemens, R., & Unsworth, J. (Eds.). (2007). A companion to digital literary studies. Oxford: Blackwell.
Terras, M. (2012). Infographic: Quantifying digital humanities. http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/dh/2012/01/20/infographic-quantifying-digital-humanities/. Accessed August 2014.
Terras, M., Nyhan, J., & Vanhoutte, E. (Eds.). (2013). Defining digital humanities: A reader. Farnham: Ashgate. ISBN 978-1-4094-6963-6.
Warwick, C., Terras, M., & Nyhan, J. (Eds.). (2012). Digital humanities in practice. London: Facet.
Wiliford, C., & Henry, C. (2012). One culture: Computationally intensive research in the humanities and social sciences. A report on the experiences of first respondents to the digging into data challenge (CLIR Publication No. 151). Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Tiedau, U. (2019). Humanities (Digital Humanities). In: Schintler, L., McNeely, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Big Data. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32001-4_112-2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32001-4_112-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-32001-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-32001-4
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Business and ManagementReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences
Publish with us
Chapter history
-
Latest
Humanities (Digital Humanities)- Published:
- 09 January 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32001-4_112-2
-
Original
Humanities (Digital Humanities)- Published:
- 14 June 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32001-4_112-1