In “The Promise of Digital Humanities”, Andrew Smith writes about the rise of digital humanities as a field due to the increasing popularity of the topic of machine analysis of text. With data mining in the picture, we can potentially and rapidly assess and cycle through hundreds of thousands and even millions of words or texts in order to arrive at an unprecedented conclusion. However, Smith does point out that all these investments in digital humanities technology have not really produced much enlightening or eye-opening results. Instead, many endeavors of data mining result in conclusions that state the obvious. I thought that this was valid point to consider because we are so ready to believe that we can achieve so many new things with the rise of technological prowess. Even though, with technological advancements, we are able to do things faster and more efficiently, we might not arrive at new, profound information all the time. It might just be that sometimes we can arrive at previously known information or analysis at a faster rate. I thought that this was important to remember, especially as students in digital humanities attempting research projects, because we might be tempted to make conclusions about our projects that are obvious. As we are learning to use new digital humanities technologies, we might be quick to render our findings as new and exciting when in fact it is possible that these new technologies make us ignorant or blind to the past conclusions that were based on years of thorough research and analysis.
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/6/175163-the-power-of-social-media-analytics/abstract
With that warning aside, data mining is potentially a very powerful tool not only for historians to gain new understandings of the past but for businesses to gain new understandings of the market and services as well. Synthesio is a social-media monitoring and research company that tracks customer opinions and posts on travel websites. Synthesio created a data mining tool to analyze the online reputations of thousands of hotels. By pin-pointing key words that attributed to negative reviews and feedback, Synthesio was able to help companies realize what they needed to improve on. For example, many customers for a specific hotel were unsatisfied because their room keys were being demagnetized by their smartphones. Synthesio was able to capture this information and relay it to the company. Then, the hotel was able to address the problem by dealing with the room-key supplier. After fixing the problem, the hotel saw a growth in positive feedback from online posts by customers. I thought that this was such an ingenious example of data mining being used to improve services for businesses. This shows us that data mining and digital humanities technologies can indeed advance our understanding of the past and improve the way businesses are run in the real world.