Andrew Smith’s article “The Promise of Digital Humanities” starts with a doubtful question: Sure, data mining through the machine analysis of text can potentially close the gap between humanities and hard sciences by “allowing us to subject historical texts to quantitative analysis”; but can it actually extract impactful information? The criticism roots from the large amount of investments that have been made in digital humanities technology that make the data mining possible, and the unsurprising, “we already knew that” results of the researches done in multiple universities. However, among the less-than-ordinary findings, some research projects do manage to find information that “fundamentally undermines the scholarly consensus about a particular history topic”, and William Turkel’s project on Data Mining with Criminal Intent was just that.
This umbrella project that required them to put in 127 million words into the database for data mining included The Old Bailey project, for which they digitized and transcribed records of 198,000 trials between 1675 and 1913 that took place in The Old Bailey, the central criminal court in London. The result was a surprising pattern that history had never figured out:
- There was an unusual increase in the number of guilty pleas and very short trials since 1825 (By 1850, one-third of all cases involved guilty pleas)
- In the 1700s there were nearly equal numbers of male and female defendants, but in 1800s men outnumbered women by nearly 10 to 1
And these findings contradicts the general historical understanding that mid-1700s was “the turning point in the development of the modern adversarial system of justice in England and Colonial America, with defense lawyers and prosecutors facing off in court”.
As Turkel’s project is a supporting evidence of digital humanities researchers’ hypothesis that data mining through machine text analysis is the key to digging through the history again for more data-backed findings, my conclusion is that these projects are when the fundamental basics of research plays a critical role: creating a hypothesis that provides value to scholars and our society, doing an extensive secondary research for the topic, thesis, and its possible outcomes, creating a specific guideline on how to efficiently perform the research project to minimize the negative impact i.e. time, effort, and especially the funding, if the hypothesis of the project is proven wrong, etc. The growing field of digital humanities need more set examples like The Old Bailey project to receive more attention and funding to support them, and each projects can really make a huge impact on the field.
References:
- William Turkel, Data Mining with Criminal Intent
- Commentary by Andrew Smith