Comment on Miriam Posner: Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction- Elva Si
Miriam Posner: Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction , June 25, 2015, Miriam Posner’s Blog
“That’s why digital humanities is so challenging and fun, because you’re always holding in your head this tension between the power of computation and the inadequacy of data.”
I think have a better understanding of “digital humanities.” I used to consider it as a glorified concept of which humanists adopted to accommodate the increasingly digitalized world. But now I see digital humanities as an necessary and effective approach to connect “data” (mostly texts) from the past and the present. It provides humanists more opportunities to dive into and understand the data with creative transformations and interpretations. Miriam raised an important and interesting point on how data is viewed differently by humanists, compared with science, social science scholars. Like she suggested, we are not extracting features from films or literature to analyze them. We are trying to dive into it and understand it from within.