Big Data and the Humanities: How digital research, computational techniques and big data contribute to knowledge

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.