Big? Smart? Long? Messy? - Data in the Humanities

Is there such a thing as data in the humanities? Aren't we dealing, rather, with books or paintings, or, maybe, with texts and images? In fact, the emergence of the digital humanities has raised the awareness for the fact that one can also look at the objects of research in the humanities as data. But is data in the humanities the same as data in the sciences? What kinds of data are there in the humanities? What are the challenges and questions that data in the humanities raise?

This lecture would like to investigate these issues by looking at a certain number of types of data that are relevant to data in the humanities: big data (as usually associated with the sciences); smart data (as in carefully encoded, digital historical-critical editions); long data (reaching far into the past of the the human record); and messy data (as a lot of data in the humanities certainly is).

The lecture will proceed by introducing the audience to a prototypical example, for each of these types of data, taken from specific research projects in the humanities and by discussing, for each of them, some of the more abstract issues raised by the example. The lecture would like to raise an awareness for the fact that data in the humanities does exist, but does not necessarily always behave in the way we would expect it to or in the way it does in the sciences. It will show that although data may not always be "big", in the humanities, it is certainly usually complex and challenging.