Big Data and the Humanities: How digital research, computational techniques and big data contribute to knowledge Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School

Professor Ralph Schroeder, Senior Research Fellow with the Oxford Internet Institute and Laird Barrett, Senior Digital Product Manager for the Taylor and Francis Group, give a talk for DHOXSS 2017. Digital research, computational techniques and big data are often considered in the context of the sciences and social sciences. In fact, many of the most exciting projects are in the humanities. The talk will cover a range of these projects, highlighting how they contribute to knowledge, their strengths and weaknesses, and ways forward. Several areas of digital research will be dealt with in depth, such as the large-scale analysis of text in literature, the visualization of intellectual and creative networks, and use of the Web to document historical patterns.

The course will also examine transformations in scholarly practices, including crowdsourcing and creating data infrastructures and digital archives. Particular attention will be paid to data sources, and debates about digital research in the humanities. The talk will also cover emerging publishing models, and how they relate to digital research. Finally, it will put digital research into the context of debates about the future of the humanities and about the relations between disciplines.