Looking through the article, I've began to wonder something that it does not entirely explained or something I've missed: how does one test hypothesis/experiment when you're dealing with abstract items (i.e. the narrative/text of literature, not the medium) that can't really be changed? Sure you could be able to record something such as changes over time in the ideas or methods used by authors, but that would be closer to an observational study such as a survey.

I'm not going to lie, while I see how distant reading could be seen as connected to digital humanities, especially since it seems to focus on the general idea of studying trends in literature of the same era, I'm not sure how people made the over-association in the first place. Personally, it still seems possible to do distant reading without needing digital tools (such as text mining).

I hold a pretty similar sentiment towards social history, with namely in holding value in the daily lives of other and similar cases, so I appreciate how this is reflected in related disciplines.

I would say that's not only the cause of human error, but possibly even the unusual cases that lie outside the "big net" of a large sample size, assuming the data set in question was lucky enough to have one.

I definitely understand why so many could easily fall into the trap of defaulting to a simple excel chart or the like, although I do think the graphic creator should be given such context behind the data before hand as a means to help the avoid the trap.

Truth be told, I honestly consider this graph as one of my favorites from this page. While it doesn't incorporate elements such as time or positioning, it presents the data in a reasonably clear fashion.

Due to the lack of visual clarity, I struggled to understand what 2005 parallels sets were actually representing in this context (especially when external searching seems to tell me that these types of plots are usually formatted horizontally), to the point of forgetting how most of these charts are tracking how of a certain grouping lived/died from the sinking, which makes me question on what benefits we get from them. I do appreciate the 2013 charts not only for an accurate line widths, but being clear enough with the color and shade distinctions in certain lines to make clear what feeds into what (although I do wish the "Survived" category was either on top or bottom rather than the middle).