{"id":1902,"date":"2015-06-25T14:23:17","date_gmt":"2015-06-25T21:23:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/?p=1902"},"modified":"2015-06-25T14:45:38","modified_gmt":"2015-06-25T21:45:38","slug":"humanities-data-a-necessary-contradiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/humanities-data-a-necessary-contradiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a talk that I gave at the Harvard Purdue Data Management Symposium<\/a> on June 17, 2015, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The audience was mostly librarians and other data-management professionals. I was the only humanities person on the program, so I wanted to talk about the ways that humanists think about data differently from people in some other fields.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Two<\/a>
Sometimes I start class discussions by comparing image quilts<\/a> of Google searches for “digital” (left) and “humanities” (right).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Today I’d like to\u00a0talk about the ways in which humanists think about data, and how that\u2019s distinct from the ways in which scientists and social scientists think about it.<\/p>\n

Even though I think our issues can be pretty different, I want to make the case that there are some very promising ways in which libraries could make meaningful interventions in the humanities research lifecycle, both for what we might call traditional humanists and for digital humanists. So I\u2019ll start with what \u201ctraditional\u201d humanists might need help with and then move on to the needs of what we call \u201cdigital humanists\u201d (although I think in practice the distinction is a bit blurred).<\/p>\n

I just want to say at the outset that there are people who specialize in humanities data curation, and I am not one of those people. A number of talented people, including Trevor Mu\u00f1oz<\/a> at the University of Maryland and Katie Rawson<\/a> at the University of Pennsylvania, have started to take a very programmatic look at the data-curation needs of digital humanists. And I encourage you to check out their important work<\/a>. But you don\u2019t have Trevor or Katie; you have me! So what I can do is share my own perspective and experience on what it means to work with data as a humanist, and where libraries can help.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll start with an anecdote, and I think that anyone who consults on digital humanities projects will be familiar with this scenario. Humanities scholars will sometimes describe elaborate visualizations to me, involving charts and graphs and change over time. \u201cGreat,\u201d I respond. \u201cLet\u2019s see your data.\u201d \u201cData?\u201d they say. \u201cOh, I don\u2019t have any data.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not because we\u2019re stupid or na\u00efve; it\u2019s that humanists have a very different way of engaging with evidence than most scientists or even social scientists. And we have different ways of knowing things than people in other fields. We can know something to be true without being able to point to a dataset, as it\u2019s traditionally understood. We can know, to take just one example, that early silent film relied on the conventions of melodrama<\/a> to create legible narratives, not because we have a spreadsheet somewhere, but because we\u2019ve immersed ourselves so deeply in our source material that we\u2019re attuned to its nuances.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why humanists sometimes think you can make a visualization without data; because they want to illustrate ideas and movement, not necessarily data points as we\u2019ve been discussing them here.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/a>
Los Angeles Review of Books<\/i>, October 28, 2012<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In fact, very few traditional humanists would call their source material \u201cdata.\u201d You may have seen this piece<\/a> in the LA Review of Books<\/em> in October 2012. While the language is pretty hyperbolic, I do think it helps to convey how uncongenial many humanists feel the notion of data is to the work that they actually do.<\/p>\n

When you call something data, you imply that it exists in discrete, fungible units; that it is computationally tractable; that its meaningful qualities can be enumerated in a finite list; that someone else performing the same operations on the same data will come up with the same results. This is not how humanists think of the material they work with.<\/p>\n

This is not a perfect analogy, but imagine that someone called your family photograph album a dataset. It\u2019s not inaccurate<\/em> per se, but it suggests that this person just fundamentally doesn\u2019t understand why you value this artifact. And it\u2019s the same with humanists. With a source, like a film or a work of literature, you\u2019re not extracting features in order to analyze them; you\u2019re trying to dive into it, like a pool, and understand it from within.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take my silent film example again. It would be possible<\/em> to enumerate all of the filmic conventions that recall the conventions of melodrama. Is there a villain? Is there a heroine? Are good and evil depicted in stark, black-and-white terms? You could even build a dataset like this and use it to show how film changed over time.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
My silent film dataset.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But, seriously, who cares? There\u2019s just such a drastic difference between the richness of the actual film and the data we\u2019re able to capture about it.<\/p>\n