What Is Data Curation and Data in Humanities:
Data curation deals with the acquisition, description, and provision of access of data to users. It involves data management such as organization, publishing, and preserving data. With the whole data curation process, data is continuously being added or removed from a database in order to maintain and enhance its reusability and relevance. This is specifically seen when digital humanists in collaboration with libraries work together to make data available and suitable for it to be reused. This in a special way is "Publishing" since they make scholarly work available to the public while ensuring that it is of an acceptable standard. If libraries can realize the importance of data curation work as a form of publishing, they will be able to better address the great need for data curation in the digital humanities community.
WHAT IS DATA IN HUMANITIES?
I learned that Data in Humanities is represented in binary notation form. This data is discrete and not continuous since it takes the form of numerical values. Digital data are processed and represented using linear structures like lists and tables in an excel data sheet or by arrays and matrices like we see when using python. The digital data created can take up two forms:
Structured data - data that is usually held in tables/databases where you can clearly identify values or relations. Some examples of structured data include addresses, credit card numbers, stock information, and geolocation. All these mentioned are easily understood by machine language.
Unstructured Data - data that does not have a pre-defined data model. This data takes the form of text files and documents, sensory data, images, videos, audios, emails, and data from social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Simply, structured data takes the form of plain texts.
We can also see this distinction happening between data and metadata. Data is part of the file that contains actual information about the object of inquiry whilst Metadata describes specific aspects of a data set such as location, size, time created, and the author.
Data in the humanities could be considered a digital, selectively constructed, machine-actionable abstraction representing some aspects of a given object of humanistic inquiry. Data in Humanities is considered as 'problematic' and faces many challenges. For example, Non-discrete data in the form of manuscripts, visual painting elements, or text from a book cannot be analyzed digitally. Many digital Humanists have very different opinions on the term "data". Joanna Drucker- Digital Humanities Practitioner argues that 'data' is inadequate while Digital Archivists Trevor Owens believes that data is not given, but is always being manufactured/created. I gravitated towards what Mr.Owens argued due to the fact that it is clear that data is actively and purposefully being created by someone every day. Take, for example, a company that hires five new employees, these new workers' names, addresses, and card information has to be added into the company's database. These employment records right here are an example of data creation.
Data in Humanities can be divided into two broad categories:
*Smart data- digital information that is formatted so that it can be acted upon or manipulated. Example data from an 18th-century novel can be used to see how descriptive writing functioned back in that time period.
Big data- are large amounts of data that can be analyzed to reveal patterns, trends, and associations as they relate to human behavior and investments. Big data are too complex for traditional data processing software to manipulate.
Word Count: 583 Words
Citations:
» Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities Journal of Digital Humanities. (n.d.). Retrieved October 12, 2021, from http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-3/big-smart-clean-messy-data-in-the-humanities/
» Data Curation as Publishing for the Digital Humanities Journal of Digital Humanities. (n.d.). Retrieved October 12, 2021, from http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-3/data-curation-as-publishing-for-the-digital-humanities/