I was intrigued by the idea of humanistic data focus on interpretation and reinterpretation. This is an idea that penetrates throughout our course. Drucker (2010) once mentioned that knowledge as interpretation. The apprehension of the phenomena of the physical, social, cultural world is through constructed and constitutive acts, not representations of pre-existing or self-evident information. Humanistic knowledge and data is so special that we cannot compare it directly with scentific data. It can be physical, digital, or digitized. It can have surrogate or complete content, static images or searchable representations. I like Borgman’s statement that “the Higg’s boson can be discovered only once, but Shakespare’s Hamlet can be reinterpreted repeatedly.”

A following point that attracted me is about source and resources, particularly about text conversion. Digitization of the entire documentation can provide new opportunities to study humanistic knowledge. I still remembered our discussion from the first few classes that we could use digital humanities to search for how a word is used through literature over time. I think the modern OCR technologies and crowdsourcing like CAPTCHA are clever and efficient tools to recognize and convert written text. With more and more searchable strings of letters spaces, punctuation, semantic information about words, phrases, headings, chapters, page breaks, personal names, places, quotations could provide us with so much richer analysis in the future.