Blog Post #2 - Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Humanities
Franco Moretti's article discusses a quantitative history of literature, specifically looking at a genre (the novel) in terms of a series of cycles - showing not one rise of the novel, but multiple rises. For me, the following statement was most illuminating: "Quantitative research provides a type of data which is ideally independent of interpretations... and that is also its limit: it provides data, not interpretation." The question arises: is data alone sufficient? Don't we expect research to also involve interpretation, hypotheses, explanations of data? Moretti's answer seems to be that while "quantification poses the problem...and leaves you often with a perfectly clear problem - and no idea of a solution," this lack of explanation (solution) is exactly what is needed, at least in his field, because we "are used to asking only those questions for which we already have an answer." Nevertheless, Moretti also seems to acknowledge in other parts of the article that he, as a researcher, wants to account for the data (and thus has published explanations and hypotheses). I am not sure yet how to reconcile this in my mind, and look forward to my own project - to see if I will be content with quantitative data, or feel compelled to provide explanations (conjectures??).
Dear Dr. Arcario: I think there is some misconception. It is sound as if data exist objectively (like, for example, chair on which I am sitting when I write this comment). But data do not exist this way. There is no such kind as data independent our question(s) and, thus, our interpretation.
ReplyDeleteThat's a strong quote to look at from the Moretti essay. That's a real debate in digital humanities, whether these visualizations come with argument -- or can be challenged at all. After all, reasoned debate has been a staple of the humanities for so many years.... There's certainly a risk in turning everything over to distant, 'machine reading' instead of human eyes and judgment. (Interestingly, I heard Eric Schmidt at Google speak at a NY Times talk last Spring, and was very clear to say that at Google, they want humans to make the final decisions and not rely too much on technology and tools. From Google, no less.)
ReplyDeleteQuantitative analysis and data obviously are not solutions to All problems. Plus, sometimes we are not sure what data will finally give us the right answer to a question/ problem we are interested or eager to know. That's why we need to try different data, different methods and different kinds of combination of both. That's basically what scientists do most of the time.
ReplyDeleteSo don't get frustrated easily if we cannot find the answer immediately. Maybe we will at another point after changing the way we look at and study the problem.