we are still far from the complete record of human culture and creativity, even if we are looking just at text.
This just show how important it is to have the human aspect to our 'data'. It gives context so that other people may be able to understand it.
The last step in this story is to reconcile, or rather to combine, the smart and the big data approaches
I agree wholeheartedly with this.The theme of digital humanities should be smart big data so we are able to work efficiently.
For most of this paper, I have been opposing big data and smart data.
I believe that smart data and big data have their places in the world today but as technology progresses I believe that big data will become smarter.
Take the Union List of Artist Names, which is an incredibly important resource that places like museums use to establish authorities — that is, to make sure they’re all using the same name to refer to an artist, and to associate that name with other data about the artist.
This is truly interesting because there have been cases where authors, events or even artifacts are coined different names because of different languages or cultures. In the '70s and '80s were encouraged to release one book per year in order to avoid saturating the market. To get around that restriction, Stephen King came up with a pseudonym: Richard Bachman. Imagine if people weren't keen on his work Bachman and King would have gone down as separate people.
For example, one of my students got really interested not in the paintings but the frames themselves, which are fairly understudied within art history. He gathered sales data for paintings sold between 1689 and 1787, and through a combination of text analysis and secondary reading, determined that two major factors made a frame valuable during this period: its beauty or its authenticity. With that information, he was able to show that there was indeed a market for frames described as “authentic” during this 100-year period.
I love this take on the paintings. It shows how 'out of the box thinking' can give discrete data a wonderful and layered meaning. This also helps us understand situations better by looking at their different factors.
So humanists — even those who aren’t digital humanists — desperately need some help managing their stuff, and libraries are in a great position to help them. I do feel that this is an underexplored opportunity space for libraries.
I'm curious to know if she is referring to digital or physical libraries. If she is referring to digital libraries, I would have to agree. As digital libraries may be more versatile where it could sort the data to how a humanist may see fit. This ease of access could cut down tie significantly in research.
Advocates of net neutrality argue that government regulation of commercial internet companies is necessary in order to ensure that these entities don’t prioritize access to some content over others.
Internet companies really abuse their power for the sake of money. They show partiality to users that provide significant revenue to them. These users may say hurtful, sexist or racist things but are protected by sweeping it under the rug and telling everyone to hush. This can be solved by having a neutral body whether it be from the government or some other third party that helps to regulate these things.
The first is a call for Google and other Silicon Valley companies whose code invisibly structures so much of contemporary life to hire people who understand how race and gender and other categories of social difference function in the world to produce different life experiences for different people.
This is indeed something that needs to be done. It is really sad to see that these companies are not allowing for such diverse perspectives. I also think it should be a genuine change rather just for PR. Showing diverse faces but failing to incorporate their different backgrounds is just as bad.