Research Methods

"The day will come, not that far off, when modifying humanities with 'digital' will make no more sense than modifying humanities with 'print'" -- Steve Wheatley, ACLS

What are the new Research Methods? In New methods for humanities research, John Unsworth wonders why we need new research methods. Last century, historian found things in archives and brought them out to the public. Now with the information deluge that's out there, is that still valid? One still needs expertise to find information, but it's not a "finding" expertise. It's now a filtering, sorting, selecting, categorizing, indexing, prioritizing expertise that is needed.

Discerning bias is another critical skill (sort of a sub-set of filtering). Familiarity with conceptual/theoretical approaches in the field is critical. Scholars need to work on alerting students to bias or problems with data. Students may not be aware that the open source web is only a part of the total internet -- that there is a whole bunch of legitimate data that is owned or otherwise controlled by people who want to make money off of it.

How do you cut across fields? Is there similarity between processes? How do you cross-fertilize from other fields? A tool called Pronetos is attempting to facilitate this kind of cross-fertilization. This kind of networking can help to identify and publicize data sets that are not online already (gasp! you mean not everything is in Google?!?).

Going back to the quote, is the adjective "digital" important? Does it add anything? Since we are so early in the "digital" game, "digital" helps to define us, to set us apart. And we are still actually defining what it means when one discusses "digital humanities." Other disciplines are struggling with defining "digital" as well. It remains to be seen what kinds of connections can be made.

The tools to follow research paths (like Zotero) and do "documentary triage" (reading several sources at once and trying to determine priorities) are still in development. (An analog database could be considered a table with several books laid out for comparison.) And humanitarians have to get over the fear of sharing their ideas -- the whole idea behind creative commons is to get your ideas out there and people will attribute it to you. Getting your name associated with an idea stakes your claim to the subject. It's important to do that so that you or others are not wasting your efforts working in parallel with someone else. Of course, the tenure process is currently working against this. But that's a bigger fight.

Do humanities departments who want to do "digital" right need to have a marketing department to make sure that the metadata is correct and in all of the formats and to make sure all of the search engines are finding it? Libraries do that now, to a certain extent. Does the humanities need a centralized "Facebook" to build networks? Or does peer review serve that purpose? See Nature's issues with on-line peer review, and please note that the group here generally disagrees with Nature's conclusions.

This was an excellent discussion, btw.

Comments

[L. Shane Carlson]

There are true issues with online peer review that need to be addressed in the future. The present circumstances are not ideal, but at Pronetos, we know that we are the last people that should be dictating what that process looks like. By allowing organic communities to develop around a central "Discipline" and populated by the actual experts, the process of evaluation is moved from the hands of the few to the hands of the many. We believe that this is what true peer review needs to look like into the future for the sake of speed, accuracy and reliability.

Don't get me started on property rights post-publication.

[tina]

Interesting post and I have more on this. My thoughts about archives is one that I think I can respond to. By and large the transformation of information in and around archives is a slow one. Based on the course work in my last class and peeking around archives online and in person, I would say that the impetus for digitzing collections in archives does two things: increase digital connectivity of archives holdings and that results in increased foot traffic to the archives in person. The objective for archives is to have utilization. The struggle for archives is the lack of resources to digitze collections and make them available to everyone. I think it's paramount to utilize the digital capabilities of the archives (if available) and to also go see it in person. Not every bit of paper will be digitized, but a proper sampling of the collection could point a researcher in the right direction.

[tina]

but then again, my classmate, Dave Lester probably has a better persepctive on that from a metadata standpoint.