Big Data and Grand Challenges. Digital Humanities in between the Humanities and the Anthropocene (original) (raw)

Big Data Studies: The Humanities in Uncharted Waters

This article discusses the formidable challenges that the advent of big data brings to the digital humanities broadly and proposes some ways the Korean studies community can prepare to navigate these uncharted waters. Standard digital humanities training in data mining, text analysis, mapping, network science, and machine learning will be developed and refined over the coming years, as will research concerning the ephemeral nature of new media, web archives, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. Yet I contend that established responses to the digital transformation of the humanities, while timely and necessary, will prove inadequate for handling petabyte-and exabyte-scale born-digital sources. In the Zettabyte Era, more data is processed in real time than all of the records produced from early times to the 2010s. To make sense of the current information regime, we need critical reflections and comparisons to the classical internet age of the 1990s, the personal computer revolution of the 1980s, and early modern print cultures. This exercise will allow us to situate the humanities in an age of big data as an extension of traditional humanities research and at the same as something foreign.

Digital Humanities and the Emergence of Big Data: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts, Guest Lecture, 14th May 2014, Faculty of Philology, Belgrade University

Since the late 19th century, the large institutional databases and database technologies (e.g. punched cards and punched card tabulators) have become an omnipresent feature of science, and the mass-scale information techniques has become a buzzword for describing a distinctive mode of knowledge production. Some observers have even suggested that big data has introduced a new epistemology of science: one in which data-gathering and knowledge production is imagined to transform the individual subject into a fully recognized and pure subject of knowledge. Digital social data are now ubiquitous. It not only refers to economic data practices, it also represents social change and a media culture on the move. How does big data influence popular culture and its shifts of power? The starting point of my contribution is the diagnosis that the big data approach is not as much representative of a digital turning point in the objectification of collective practices but embedded in historical cultures of information, media, image and narration itself. In a methodological regard, it is essentially important not only to reconstruct a history of big data from the early modern period to the present, but also offer a critical perspective on the historical developments of modern data practices and epistemologies. To resolve these questions, my contribution should reflect the changing role of the database in society and the draft will provide a historical depth to the on-going discussion of the so-called Control Revolution of data-intensive modes of knowledge production.

Big Humanities Project, in: The SAGE Encyclopedia of Big Data, ed. by L.A. Schintler, C.L. McNeely, G. Golson, Sage: London/New York 2015 (draft)

“Big Humanities” are a heterogenic field of research between IT, cultural studies and humanities in general. Recently, because of higher availability of digital data, they gained even more importance. The term “Big Humanities Data” has prevailed due to the wider usage of the Internet and it replaced the terms like “Computational Science” and “Humanities Computing”, which have been used since the beginning of the computer era in the 60s. These terms were related mostly to the methodological and practical development of digital tools, infrastructures and archives. In this context one should reflect on the technical fundamentals of the computer-based process of gaining insights within the research of humanities and cultural studies while critically considering data, knowledge genealogy and media history in order to evaluate properly the understanding of a role in the context of digital knowledge production and distribution.

The Digital Arts and Humanities: Neogeography, Social Media and Big Data Integrations and Applications

The “Information Bomb” that Paul Virilio (2000) described has hit the humanities as much as the arts. Online art, digital art, the digital humanities, environmental humanities and digital heritage – all of these are among the buzzwords of the moment in academia. Yet – at least in the humanities – there’s a growing concern what this digital scholarship is supposed to deliver in terms of new insights so generated. Furthermore, as Andrew Prescott (2012) warns, the digital humanities have “become annexed by a very conservative view of the nature of humanities scholarship.” Too many digital humanities practitioners, he observes “have too often seen their role as being responsible for shaping on-line culture and for ensuring the provision of suitably high-brow material.” Prescott states that “this is a futile enterprise as the culture of the web has exploded. The internet has become a supreme expression of how culture is ordinary and everywhere, and there is a great deal for us to explore.” The chapters in this book illuminate how digital methods, employing arts and humanities tropes can navigate around misplaced expectations and “analogue disciplinary orthodoxies.” This text contextualizes the Digital Arts and Humanities within disciplinary discourses such as history, performance studies, geography and geo-hazards, environmental humanities, indigenous and Irish studies, conflict transformation, urban mobility, social media, Neo-geography and Big Data. In doing so it offers illustrations on how to facilitate digital literacy and research involving visualization, language, human behaviour, culture, society, time and place.

Controversies around the Digital Humanities: An Agenda

Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, 2012

Observations on the current stage of the Digital Humanities and their environment identify four dangers: (1) The focus on infrastructures for the Digital Humanities may obscure that research ultimately is driven by analytical methods and tools, not just by the provision of data or publishing tools. (2) Information technology can support the Humanities in many forms and national traditions. That textual analysis is much discussed right now, should not hide the view of a broader disciplinary field. (3) The mobile revolution looming may once again lead to a repetition of highly destructive processes observed at the PC and the internet revolutions. (4) The Digital Humanities may have to take a much stronger part in the development, not only the reception, of technology. – A series of concrete and controversial questions, which allow the discussion of some of these trends, is derived. 1. Background and motivation for a discussion of the Digital Humanities “Computing in the Humanities” ha...

Ten Challenges for Digital Humanities and the Way Forward

International Journal of Computational Methods in Heritage Science

Regardless of whether one supports Digital Humanities as a discipline in its own, ‘traditional' Humanities are transforming with the incorporation of computational approaches. In this short position paper, we outline ten challenges that we consider important and propose to kick-off an in-depth dialog for the future shaping of Digital Humanities, without prejudices and preconceptions. The presentation of the challenges situates them with respect to trends and evolutionary developments in society and technology, and some first comments are being made in kicking-off the dialog for the shaping of the future.

Deconstructing the cloud: Responses to Big Data phenomena from social sciences, humanities and the arts

Big Data & Society, 2015

The era of Big Data comes with the omnipresent metaphor of the Cloud, a term suggesting an ephemeral and seemingly endless storage space, unhindered by time and place. Similar to the satellite image of the Whole Earth, which was the icon of technological progress in the late 60s, the Cloud as a metaphor breathes the promise of technology, whilst obfuscating the hardware reality of server farms and software infrastructure necessary to enable the proliferation of (big) data. This article presents projects from the fields of humanities, social sciences and the arts that formulate a response to Big Data and its human and automated practices, from data analytics dashboards to critical reflections on smart technologies and objects.

Smart Data for Digital Humanities

Journal of Data and Information Science, 2017

The emergence of “Big Data” has been a dramatic development in recent years. Alongside it, a lesser-known but equally important set of concepts and practices has also come into being—“Smart Data.” This paper shares the author’s understanding of what, why, how, who, where, and which data in relation to Smart Data and digital humanities. It concludes that, challenges and opportunities co-exist, but it is certain that Smart Data, the ability to achieve big insights from trusted, contextualized, relevant, cognitive, predictive, and consumable data at any scale, will continue to have extraordinary value in digital humanities. The emergence of “Big Data” has been a dramatic development in recent years. Alongside it, a lesser-known but equally important set of concepts and practices has also come into being—“Smart Data.”