Andrew Smith’s “The Promise of Digital Humanities” brings up some very interesting points on the impact digital scholarship and the increasing incorporation of technology have on the humanities fields. I tend to think of the digital humanities field as one that allows for traditional humanities research to expand and become more accessible through technology, however not all digital humanities initiatives accomplish this end. Smith brings up a valid observation that some projects use digital components to re-state the obvious and then applaud themselves for incorporating technology to support their findings. Apart from this pitfall, I think that the use of data mining to examine the veracity of humanities research opens up exciting avenues for scholarly thought. Because analysis tools are becoming more widespread, there is an added incentive to use data that supports the trend being examined or written upon rather than ignoring it to further the specific thesis with hand picked anecdotes . Analyzing text in this quantitative manner opens up new avenues for researching and promoting ideas across the humanities and even into the scientific fields.
After finishing this commentary, I was drawn to a related linked article of his, “So what’s text analysis actually good for?” From Smith’s first article, it seems like text analysis can open a lot of doors for innovative questions and methods but that it’s taking a little longer for researchers to utilize these resources to their fullest. The video (embedded below and also on the article page) gives some insight into what current scholarship is doing to integrate digital tools. This research incorporates traditional lines of humanities research inquiry but uses search tools to facilitate the process by allowing the researcher to not get caught up in the vast number of sources to sift through.
This second article made me realize that using digital resources for a project is only the first step in making a real difference in digital scholarship. Digital humanities research is most effective when technology is used to significantly advance a realm of scholarship; the maximum impact is made with innovative ideas combined with effective use of digital resources. This is something we should all keep in mind as we continue our research for this course and for our future endeavors; incorporating technology should support our end goal, not be the end goal.