A New Companion to Digital Humanities by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

Ubiquitous Text

Text may be less flashy and less glamorous than other forms of communication such as sound, image, and video, but it remains the dominant way that humans communicate, discover, and process information. It is estimated that every day some 200 billion emails are sent and some 5 billion Google search queries are performed – and they are nearly all text-based.4 The hundred hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute would remain largely inaccessible were it not for text-based searches of the title, description, and other metadata. Even if we hesitate to join the poststructuralist theorists (like Kristeva, quoted above) in saying that everything is text, we can certainly agree that text is everywhere.

For humanities scholars and students working with texts as cultural artifacts, it is reassuring to recognize that people from every sector in our digital society are struggling with how to derive meaning from texts, from high-school students researching an essay topic to journalists combing through leaked security documents, or from companies measuring social media reaction to a product launch to historians studying diversity of immigration based on more than two centuries of trial proceedings.5 The particular texts, methodologies, assumptions, and objectives vary widely between different applications, of course, but fundamentally we are all trying to gain insights from the vast amount of text that surrounds us.

We are unrelentingly bombarded by text in our lives and we have access to unfathomable quantities of other texts.6 Yet for some, the problem is the opposite one: a dearth of readily accessible and reliable digital texts, whether because of legal reasons (like copyright or privacy), technical challenges (such as the difficulty of automatically recognizing characters in handwritten documents), or resource constraints that make it impractical to digitize everything (parish records scattered throughout the world, for instance). As a result, there is a significant inequality in the availability of digital texts, one that has a profound effect on the kinds of work that scholars are able to pursue.

When text is available there can be so much of it that we naturally seek ways of representing significant features of it more compactly and more efficiently, often through visualization. Visualizations are transformations of text that tend to reduce the amount of information presented, but in service of drawing attention to some significant aspect. For example, if you wanted to make an argument about the differences between the vocabulary used in mainstream commercials for toys targeted at girls compared with toys targeted at boys, you could simply compile examples from a sample set of about 60 advertisements and invite your reader to peruse the full texts. Or you could create word cloud visualizations for each gender, as Crystal Smith (2011) did (Figure 19.2).

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