Digital humanities is a relatively new and still progressing approach to exploring cultures, histories, and other humanised fields with the help of digital devices. It mainly deals with “complex problems” through an accurate data model, which can be both quantitative and qualitative. To be specific, the line graph illustrates that the rise of google books slightly inspires the increase of digital use for humanities in the 1800s and a roar in the 1900s, reaching its peak in 2000. However, what the graph shows is not completely true since nowadays digital devices neither overweight nor replace humanities, from which we learn that accurate data may also tell a lie. The article “The Digital Humanities Moment” written by MATTHEW K. GOLD (2012) delineates how digital humanities initiates to become a field and the article in 2016 confirms that digital humanities have reached its goal to be a field. In 2019’s article, digital humanities tend to be more mature and comprehensive to “model our research” in academia.
Women Writers Project (WWP) is a project at Northeastern University based on long-term research which involves early women’s writings in English (1526-1850). It mainly collects electronic raw materials and less-known works, coping with complex issues in a corpus-based digital form. This digital project bridges academic research and teaching, theories and archive, and modes of digital representations. It also offers free and available published materials and resources for teaching to the public. More importantly, instead of subjectively interpreting literary works, the project provides digital research tools to objectively conduct close text analysis, which not only raises new research methods but also provides an “unparalleled view of women’s literate culture in the early modern period”. I find this project quite comprehensive as it involves both literary texts and abundant essays, sample syllabi, suggested assignments and experimental tools, confirming its relationship between academic research and teaching.
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I think this project is super interesting and allows for greater distribution of female works. I like how you commented on the subjective vs. objective data that provides insight into the literary works, personally, I find the fact that DH merges literature with objective data is one of its most innovative qualities. some of the other posts I have read have mentioned the potential drawback of having too much data on a DH project.. do you feel that this project is confusing or messy in any way because of how much data is in there?
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Your introduction sets up how digital humanities studies are used very well. The reference to the graph we examined in class poses an interesting quesiton as to our understanding of how we interepret data, because you’re right, we have to keep in mind that the data we see might not always be an accurate reflection of the way things are.
I had a quick look at the WWP website, and I found it really interesting. I agree with your observation of the project being comprehensive, especially in terms of its global perspective and its collection of rare texts. However, despite this, one of the world maps displayed a focus on European and North American texts. I think it would be good to see the data set expand to cover outwith these areas, especially with such little representation from countries in the Southern Hemisphere.
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I like how you’ve highlighted the limitations of DH with the Google Books graph, though I think it would be helpful to include an image of the line graph for additional clarity and better reference. It may also be helpful to dissect the graph a bit more as your explanation is slightly confusing and ends rather abruptly – whilst I agree with you in that modern digital devices will not overweight nor replace the more analogue aspects of humanities, I don’t believe that such is the message conveyed by the graph (or at least not the only definition we could extract from it). However you’ve ended on a strong note with the observation on the evolving attitudes and goals of DH through the years.
Your introduction to the WWP is cohesive and excels in clarity, providing the audience with a descriptive insight into DH in action. The project is an excellent example of the ‘redemption’ of DH in recent years, amplifying the voices of women in literature, whom were traditionally less published and heard in the literary field relative to their male counterparts. I also like how you’ve mentioned that it’s a free public resource, allowing accessibility to not just scholars and institution-specific academics, but the wider public as well, adequately encapsulating the modern era of DH for social issues.