Reading Assignment - Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction: Qingyu Cai
The article called Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction points out how humanists think about data and how that’s different from how other people, for instance, scientists and social scientists, think about it. After reading through the whole passage and recalling what I have learned about digital humanities, I somehow found another definition of this subject. Before, I regarded digital and humanities as two distinct aspects of content and focus. The contradiction between these two subjects made it more interesting, innovative, and exciting. However, now I prefer to regard digital humanities as a tool for connecting and communicating. Data management helps to keep and digitize past information, which enables more people to use and play with it. Besides, ways to organize, manage and visualize data can further help express the data to let more people know about it, understand, and develop more contributions. So, digital humanities workers’ roles are translators and managers responsible for storing data, presenting, and managing.