Miriam Posner an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles discusses the ways in which humanists think about data. The way humanists think about data is completely different than the way people from other fields think about it. This just means that humanists have a different way of engaging with evidence then most scientists or even social scientists as they have become so immersed in the source material that they are attuned to its nuances.

In Miriam Posner Blog ∥2015∥, she details the attuning as the reason why humanists think an illusion can be made without data. This is because humanists wish to illustrate the movements and ideas and not data points. Interestingly, very few traditional humanists would call their source material “data” as they feel that data is the work they do. This is further emphasized by Miriam Posner ∥2015∥ who states that “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.” With the era of technology, come new tools that data can be stored in the form of. Traditionally it was hard for humanists to manage their works as there is a lot of it. However Miriam believes that if data can be analyzed computationally then this facilitates the easier storage of their data. She believes that this is why the new type of humanity; digital humanity is here to stay.

Digital humanists are people who use digital tools to explore humanities questions. They, however, have a greater need of data management. Though they might utilize spreadsheets, images and videos and even Metadata; which is structured information that describes, explains, locates or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use or manage an information resource; to help manage their data. The way digital humanists work with data can have many complications such as:

  • Digital Humanists often ending up in conflict with publishers due to the nature of the work; so much so, there have even been cases of scholars, being threatened with lawsuits due to excessive downloading.

  • Digital Humanists mining data from historical documents instead of generally creating data through experimentation. This means that they want different tools and encounter data wrangling problems resulting in them using creative transformations and interpretations.

  • Locating a humanities dataset is awful as the repositories or registries for humanities data are horribly limited. In addition, they need help to aggregate datasets and link them after locating them as it is difficult to know who releases what dataset.

  • Web services such as Sayeed are not necessary as they are built on top of existing datasets, digital humanists are working with API’s and it is insufficient to download one record at a time.

  • Help is needed for data modeling. For data modeling, libraries for data humanities would play a part in advising humanists on data modeling.

  • Lastly, new kinds of data specifications are needed as the current standards are inadequate.

    • All in all, data in humanities requires humanists to think deeply to the extent of what data truly is, the relationship data has with reality, where data may be inadequate and how can data be broken down. Data in Humanities is challenging yet fun as it considers the power of computation and the inadequacy of data to truly represent reality.