Google Fusion Tables

August 30: Post edited to reflect that you don’t need Python to download Web of Science data. Thanks for the correction, Scott Weingart!

If a digital component is an unnecessary accessory, rather than an innova-tive means of solving a real research problem, then it should be dropped

One riposte is that the digital (and the quantitative) cannever accommodate the vagueness of meaning and vagaries of culture that close read-ing can. Ted Underwood (who prefers distant reading as the name of his own field ofinquiry, rather than digital humanities; cf. Dinsman 2016) has described this objectioncleverly:[. . .] it has become folk wisdom that computers can only handle crisp binary logic. Ifyou tell a computer that a novel both is, and is not, an example of detective fiction, thecomputer is supposed to stammer desperately and emit wisps of smoke. In reality, thewhole point of numbers is to handle questions of degree that don’t admit simple yes orno answers. Statistical models are especially well adapted to represent fuzzy boundaries[. . .] (Underwood 2014:9)

FrancoMoretti

TEI encoding

In doing so we learn something true, but we also distort the system, lending outsized importance to our object at the expense of those textual features outside our purview.

Hubble telescope

Usually, they provided a summaryof the novel:

they also become much more similar to each other:

The "results" of DH, then, are not entirely illusory. They have turned many humanists into establishmentcurators and made critical thought a form of planned obsolescence.

Compared with the brute optical scanning of distant reading, human reading issymphonic —a mixture of subliminal speaking, note-taking, savoring, and associating.

neophyte

Roughly a decade’s worth of resources have now beenthrown in their direction, including the founding of an Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment forthe Humanities, unheard-of amounts of funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a parade of celebratoryanthologies backed by crossover articles in high-profile magazines, and academic job openings in an era of tenuretrackscarcity. So, with all their promise, and all this help, what exactly have the digital humanities accomplished?It is a hard question to answer.

After a decade of investment and hype, what has the field accomplished? Not much.First came the debacle of the high-priced "Ada" algorithm, the control center of Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated operation.Next ESPN wonk Nate Silver, after flubbing the 2016 election forecast, defended his numbers by claiming that hewas not more wrong than every other statistical predictor since 1968. Finally, consider the kerfuffle overCambridge Analytica, the British company whose "psychographics" method of data modeling and "emotionanalysis" claimed to be the Trump camp’s secret weapon —until skeptics recalled that Ted Cruz and Ben Carsonhad employed their services as well.

proliferation

tenure

concomitant

incommensurate

epiphenomenal

s it only an accident that the emergence of digitalhumanities has coincided with the intensiication of the economic crisis inthe humanities in higher education?

epistemological

concomitant

stories of man’s first disobedience seemed to have been—ever so briefly—undone

facticity