Yesterday, I talked with a group of folks in the History Department about this thing we’ve been kicking around the library called “Humanities Data”. Thanks to Dean Rehberger for the invite, and thanks also to Brandon Locke for hosting us in the newly launched LEADR lab. The presentation itself was in part a product of some writing Devin Higgins and I have been doing together on Digital Collections as Humanities Data, and why that framing might be useful for librarians to think about. If all goes well I’ll be linking to a preprint relatively soon. In lieu of the preprint Im sharing the presentation which includes some of the definitional questions we work through in the paper.
For the curious, we put forward the following definition of data:
Data are records of difference arranged, interpreted, and put into the service of argumentation according to disciplinary norms and methodologies.