As much as the digital humanities is devoted to preserving and enhancing sources, it also plays a major role in the creation of data itself. To create data from humanities sources, in a broad sense, is to approach those sources with a specific goal or method in mind for reading, understanding, portraying, or otherwise perceiving the source that may not be evident as it is. As Thomas Padilla puts it, it is not “about data for data’s sake,” but instead to “to build upon our commitments to support nothing less than the ability to experience life as worth living.” Befitting the multifaceted nature of digital humanities, such data can be created in myriad ways; this module illustrated several examples of projects that created data for specific goals. For instance, the Tudor networks project digitally catalogued thousands of archived letters in order to create network maps that highlighted facts such as time frames and frequencies of correspondence between people. Moreover, the Early African American Film Database allows users to easily connect films and their production companies with respective actors, personnel, and geographic location for fuller understanding of those films’ reach and origins. If these projects all had different goals, the ensuing data would likely look and be organized differently, which echoes Miriam Posner’s point about how this kind of humanist-oriented data is different than traditional views of the word: “When you call something data, you imply that it exists in discrete, fungible units; that it is computationally tractable; that its meaningful qualities can be enumerated in a finite list; that someone else performing the same operations on the same data will come up with the same results. This is not how humanists think of the material they work with.” Instead, data from humanities sources comprises answers to questions brought up by “digital humanists – that is, people who use digital tools to explore humanities questions.”
The nature of this kind of data naturally demonstrates how important the individual process is for each endeavor; thus, transparency and communication are vital to digital humanities. Hoekstra and Koolen state that “Transparency of approach, whether digital or analogue, requires describing the activities that constitute that approach, and how they are combined in a process to generate new knowledge or ways of seeing.” This quote both summarizes the purpose of creating humanities data and emphasizing that those new perspectives are the result of the individual process at work, which must be accurately communicated. In the example of creating data with the Slave Narrative Project, it was important to immediately define the categories that data was going to be created through, such as names, locations, and dates, as well as the software that the data is supposed to be read through, in this case being a spreadsheet software such as Excel. Of course, although the scope or focus of research questions can change over time and as the data is created, the purpose of research should always be apparent and consistent. Overall, creating humanities data is an important aspect of digital humanities that must be done deliberately, meticulously, and transparently.

Sources:

Collections as Data: Conditions of Possibility | by Thomas Padilla | Medium

Data scopes for digital history research.pdf

Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction – Miriam Posner’s Blog