Data

Why Make Data Out of Humanities Sources?

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Turning a source like a WPA slave chronicle into a row of data feels, at first, like a loss; Charlie Aarons’s “I don’t know, but I sure been ’round here long time” becomes, in a spreadsheet, just “Not stated.” But that loss is also what makes certain questions askable in the first place. Closely reading one interview alerts you about one life. Arranging five interviews into equivalent fields, as we did in this module’s activity, lets you ask questions no single tale could answer: how many of these five people were enslaved in more than one state? How did stated ages at liberation contrast across interviews? Paul Escott’s much more enormous version of this same move, coding eighty-one variables across 2,358 narratives, is what let him make assertions about patterns across a population rather than the texture of one life (Escott, Slavery Remembered, Appendix A, 1979).

Johanna Drucker makes the fundamental point unswervingly: data are not “given”; they’re “captured” – capta – through acts of collection and organizing, and that structuring is what makes enumeration, cleaning, and comparison possible at all (Drucker, “Data Modeling and Use,” The Digital Humanities Coursebook, 2021). Miriam Posner’s edging of “humanities data” as an essential paradox captures the tension well: humanists need the term to get their evidence taken seriously as infrastructure, even though the signal itself counterattacks the orderliness the word implies (Posner, “Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction,” 2015).

What has to stay visible, though, is the process. Ahnert and Ahnert’s Tudor Networks of Power is a good model for this: turning 130,000+ early modern letters into network data took nine months of named, documented labor, a custom “Disambiguation Engine,” and an explicit guiding principle, “it is better not to collapse John Smith and J. Smith unless we could find evidence they were the same person,” because an over-connected network can fabricate historical significance that was never there (Ahnert & Ahnert, Tudor Networks of Power, Oxford University Press, 2023, Introduction).

Hoekstra and Koolen argue this kind of disclosure should be routine rather than exceptional: every choice to select, enrich, connect, and analyze historical data changes it, and those choices are “rarely reported and discussed” even though they shape the findings (Hoekstra & Koolen, “Data Scopes for Digital History Research,” Historical Methods 52, no. 2, 2018). Our own activity bore this out directly: comparing our Aarons data model against the instructor’s example and against Escott’s categories showed how differently two careful readers can structure the same interview, and our cleaning pass showed how much interpretive judgment hides inside something as small as whether a blank cell means “not asked” or “not applicable.” Making that visible- the categories chosen, the judgment calls, what’s missing and why, and the source’s own prior history of handling- is what keeps data-driven humanities arguments honest.

Metadata

Why Metadata Matters

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Metadata matters in digital humanities because a digitized item is worthless if no one can discover or make sense of it. Martin and Neatrour put it this way: metadata is “descriptive information” that gives “context for a resource” and “makes the item… discoverable by people” (Martin and Neatrour 2015). Without a Title, Subject, Date, or Location field, a photo like their “Drat! The Cat!” production still, or my own photo of a Garri tub, is just an unlabeled folder. Their “Springfield” illustration (there are Springfields in Illinois, Australia, Ontario, and more) confirms why ambiguous location metadata disrupts discoverability, and their “Big Ben Ranch” instance reveals description can also be “too much” or “not enough,” information I could have adopted when I photographed five kitchen items practically at random; without Object/Title, Date, and Description fields for each (juice bottle, Garri, popcorn, the bowl under running water, pot cabinet), nobody perusing them later, including me, would know what each was signifying.

Carbajal and Caswell further push this in their argument that historians must treat metadata substructure itself as an investigation question: how records “came to be” digitized and systematized profiles what can be initiated and how dependably (Carbajal and Caswell 2021). The Medium article on taxonomy versus tagging explains the reasons disciplines alone aren’t enough: severe hierarchical classifications can’t embrace an item that belongs to several circumstances at once, while variable tags “operate…like filters,” allowing the same photo to be labeled both “packaging” and “Ghanaian foodways” concurrently (Categories or Tagging).

Tropy and Omeka put these lessons into practice at two distinct stages. Tropy is built for the research-shaping phase: it lets you import photos of archival resources, or kitchen items, and assign organized metadata (title, date, tags, notes) to each photograph, turning a file of otherwise indistinguishable photographs into something searchable and citable. Omeka shines in the publishing phase, using a Dublin Core metadata schema (Title, Subject, Creator, Description) almost indistinguishable from the fields Martin and Neatrour walk through, to turn a digitized assemblage into a public, browsable, tag-searchable online parade. Together they reveal that metadata isn’t correspondence nailed onto digitization; rather, it’s the formation that walks a pile of digital substitutes, like my five lumbering kitchen pictures, into an authentic operational collection.

Digitization

Digitizing Items: What Do We Gain and What Do We Lose?

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For this week’s kitchen activity, I grabbed five items from the kitchen with little planning — a bottle of apple juice, a tub of Garri (grated cassava), a bag of microwave popcorn, a red measuring bowl catching water from the tap, and a shelf of pots and pans. I photographed them with my iPhone 15. Then I ran two of them, the juice bottle and the Garri tub, through KIRI Engine to generate 3D models. Comparing the two versions of “digitizing” the same items made it clear what digitization captures and what it drops. The plain photographs conserved surface, color, and label text moderately well, but compressed each item into a single flat perspective. For instance, I couldn’t stroll around the Garri tub the way I could in the kitchen. But the 3D scans reconditioned volume by allowing me to rotate and examine the item from any angle, although the final models/outcome seemed remarkably altered and sometimes sharper or stranger than the source photographs.

This aligns with how Drucker depicts photogrammetry as a method formed from various images sewed into a mesh of details and shapes, continuously restricted by “existing physical evidence” (Drucker 2021, 162). A technique that relies on steadily “reading” a surface across tons of photos is precisely the kind of procedure a transparent bottle or a shining plastic lid would contest, which is likely why my scans buckled or faded those surfaces. None of my approaches registered smell, weight, temperature, or the sound of the tap running into the bowl, an indication that the digital record is always an unfinished, technique-dependent slice, never the item itself. No wonder Hughes maintains digitization is not preservation and a replacement can never substitute the original (quoted in Terras, “Digitization and Digital Resources in the Humanities,” n.d.).

That subjectivity has real effects on how we comprehend and utilize digitized resources. Because I only digitized five objects I happened to understand, my little “collection” is a partial, subjective sample of the kitchen, a small-scale variety of the collection delinquent Terras labels at the formal level, where on normal only about 22 percent of European heritage collections have been digitized at all, shaped by funding, curatorial priorities, and “memory politics” instead of research value (Terras 2022, 257, 259; https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350232143.ch-24). Just as Old Bailey Online and Vindolanda Tablets Online reframed corporeal documents as searchable, analyzable metadata, allowing full-text exploration across 190,000 page images, something never conceivable with the paper exemplars — my 3D-scanned Garri tub turned to something I could alternate and measure, but in the process it lost the marker’s legibility and the palpable, appropriate cues that would tell an unfamiliar individual what it is or how it’s used (Terras, “Digitization and Digital Resources,” n.d.). Drucker advances a similar apprehension about 3D “mutant” artifact projects like the Met/Microsoft GenStudio: once objects become manipulable meshes, they risk becoming “autonomous objects,” treasured for form and stripped of their real cultural and everyday role (Drucker 2021, 166–167). Digitization opens genuinely new possibilities, but it always strips away some of an object’s initial worth in exchange for that impressionability.

Search

Finding Digitized Sources for My Research

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Finding digitized sources for my research project showed me that investigating historical sources electronically goes beyond randomly typing keywords into a database and selecting the first suitable result. My research centers on African and Nigerian history, specifically questions of colonialism, kinship, paternity, law, and medicine. Because of this focus, I quickly learned that a handful of the databases in this section are not fully applicable to my research.

I began with the George Mason University Library databases and subject guides, exclusively the segments on primary sources and archival collections. These furnished a valuable starting point for finding databases and grasping how libraries structure digital research materials. I also explored collections from the National Library of Medicine, which were especially helpful because my research examines the history of biomedical data and techniques. These explorations pushed me beyond conventional historical databases and led me to consider scientific and medical collections as significant historical sources.

The UK’s Endangered Archives Program (EAP) is the most productive resource for my project. Compared with the handful of databases available in the module, EAP includes digitized archival resources from Africa, including Nigeria. This experience showed a crucial weakness of digital research: digitization does not necessarily equate to equal geographical representation. A database may include thousands or millions of files but still contain little data related to a specific region or research variable.

The module readings also transformed how I reflect about searching. Information: A Historical Companion, Daniel Rosenberg’s examination of “Search,” remarkably stresses that searching is itself a historical and technological exercise rather than a neutral way of recovering data. Rosenberg reveals how information has been constructed, coordinated, saved, and recovered across distinct historical periods.

My experience searching these collections demonstrated the importance of flexibility. When a general database yields few useful results, it signals the need to adjust keywords, seek specialized collections, or search by institution. For my research, valuable digital resources may not be in large databases but in specialized projects such as the George Mason University interlibrary loan and Endangered Archives Program. Digital research compels not only locating sources but also realizing who digitized them, what was protected, what was not, and how the search technique shapes what can be found.

Copyright

A Navigational Guide to Digitized Archives: Rights, Statuses, and Constraints

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For digital humanities (DH) experts, the internet is like an enormous accessible archive. However, as Franky Abbott cautions in the Public Library Partnerships Project video, digitizing substantial material is lawfully a “reproduction,” and presenting it online establishes “publication” in copyright law. To protect your work, closely scrutinize how platforms standardize materials.

Locating Rights Information

Rights metadata connects an item to its lawful status. To find it, search the platform’s individual item metadata plate (normally located under “Usage” or “Rights” fields, as seen on the Internet Archive or NYPL Digital Collections). Extensive terms are also hardcoded into site headings under links identified as “Terms of Use” or “Privacy Policy.”

The Four Crucial Legal Statuses

  1. Public Domain: Works whose legal copyright conditions have terminated, for example, the 1925 Manhattan Land Books at NYPL, are not under copyright limitations. This is publishable on a blog without permission. This is because unabridged digital imaging of public domain data does not create a new copyright.
  2. Licensed Material: Creative Commons licenses let surviving artists retain ownership while permitting public access under restrictions. For instance, the Willis Bell Photographic Archive employs a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, enabling non-commercial blog usage if identifiable attribution is granted.
  3. Active Copyright: Advanced creative works are rightfully secure for the author’s life plus seventy years. While public distribution is restricted, the Data-Sitters Club argues that copying text into a catalog for quantitative text mining constitutes a legally defensible “transformative use” under the Fair Use doctrine, provided it does not create a market substitute.
  4. Terms of Use Constraints: Despite copyright protections, establishments can restrict data use through contract law. As Judy G. Russell notes in The Legal Genealogist, archives administer “browsewrap” or “clickwrap” contracts that help file determinations or stop text indexing completely. For instance, the formal Clarivate Terms clearly assert that users “shall not… perform any text or data mining or indexing.”

Understanding these points helps keep digital humanities exploration ethically grounded and legally protected.

Definitions

A Definition of Digital Humanities

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What is widely known today as Digital Humanities (DH) has variously been called humanities computing and conceived by scholars to serve different purposes. For instance, Charles Henry, in his earliest work, suggests that computing in the humanities ab initio concerns itself with language-based statistical counting of literary text. While this is common, users experienced a degree of seclusion or restriction, and it was often limited to a select group of people. In essence, the introduction and/or use of computers for literary exercises or textual research in the humanities experienced delays, and where available, it was limited to a select group of people. To resolve this challenge, Henry suggests a tripartite solution. First, language should be conceived beyond its literary component, but as a complex of mental activities involving the swinging of worlds together; cognitive science and the biology of science.

John Unsworth further refined Henry’s position by explicitly naming the field “humanities computing”. By now, the computer has become a modeling tool. He argues that the computer has moved beyond a subordinate tool, such as a typewriter, phonograph, or telephone, to become a major instrument used not only for literary appreciation but also as a medium of communication among humans.

Indeed, by 1999, humanities computing began to be discussed and conceived not as an element, a literary tool, or cognitive importance but as an institutional body – a discipline. Its extension into information technology further made this conversation both solid and enthralling. While no degree was noted to be offered yet in humanities computing, attention was given to it. However, after 2004, humanities computing transformed into Digital Humanities. By this time, its tentacles transcended the humanities and became interdisciplinary, as scholars and practitioners connected, collaborated, and disseminated knowledge by using the technological tools the internet and social media provided to conduct research and share findings with wider audiences. Beyond that, since the transition to DH, scholars have been able to overcome challenges and limitations in knowledge dissemination by attending conferences that bring together practitioners and academia, as well as making outcomes available through open access.