The readings this week were thought-provoking. What happens to the humanities now that they are digital, and what if we could have a richer querying system that let us search across different kinds of sources and databases to make more connections to the past?

Porsdam

There are a lot of things going on in Digital Humanities.  Quantitative vs qualitative concerns, computational humanities, humanistic technology, losing humanistic core competencies, the cross-over with public interests, perhaps a utopian “digital enfranchisement of the public.”  It’s all a bit much for a digital historian newly under development, to take in. However, I have always been concerned about the divide between history (humanities) and science.  I believe the state of our education system derives from this divide. I have read C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), and found that my concerns lived a long life before I came to know them.

I agree that we “should work toward developing a humanistic understanding of technology.” It isn’t up to historians alone, it’s also up to scientists.  I fully believe we need each other, because we are all having the human experience.  So, I am all for using digital tools to “bridge the gap…between the quantitative orientation of the natural sciences and critical cultural discourses in the humanities.”  Bridging that gap may be part of the whole digital age paradigm shift, but I am not sure we will know it has worked until it has passed. That’s history.

Ciravegna et al.

The Semantic Web.  This is different than the plethora of “application-specific interfaces” that humanities database designers have created along the way.  The semantic web would be an attempt to go beyond internet keyword searching, to mine information in web pages, not just perform data retrieval (66).  It would be able to draw data from a variety of differently structured sources and render it intelligible, with a single, unified matrix which defines the relations of the parts to one another and to the whole (69).  The issue of how historians deal with primary and secondary sources came up.  There’s the evidence, and then there’s the historiography.  Which should be included?  At stake is an oncology of history, but the ambiguity and complexity of history makes it difficult to to model history this way.  Anyway, there are strides being made in the techniques of Semantic Web technology, if not the thing being made, itself.  I am excited about this technology.