Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

230
This lack of deeper understand<strong>in</strong>g about the nature of humanities data raises complicated questions
regard<strong>in</strong>g what type of data are produced, how data should be captured, and how data should be
curated for reuse. Borgman also drew attention to Clifford Lynch’s dichotomy of data as raw material
vs. <strong>in</strong>terpretation (Lynch 2002), po<strong>in</strong>t<strong>in</strong>g out that it br<strong>in</strong>gs up two relevant issues for the digital
humanities. First, raw material is far more likely to be curated then scholars’ <strong>in</strong>terpretations of
materials, and while it may be the nature of humanities research to constantly re<strong>in</strong>terpret sources,
“what is new is the necessity of mak<strong>in</strong>g explicit decisions about what survives for migration to new
systems and formats.” Second, humanities scholars usually have little control over the <strong>in</strong>tellectual
property rights of the sources they use (e.g., images of manuscripts, cuneiform tablets), a factor that
can make data shar<strong>in</strong>g very complicated <strong>in</strong> the humanities.
Another <strong>in</strong>terest<strong>in</strong>g comparison between the data practices of those work<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> the digital humanities
and those work<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> the sciences was offered by Edmond and Schreibman (2010):
If we apply a science paradigm, a digital humanities scholar could be compared to an
experimental physicist, as someone who designs processes and <strong>in</strong>struments to f<strong>in</strong>d the answers
to their research questions. But the most strik<strong>in</strong>g difference between the experimental humanist
and the experimental physicist lies <strong>in</strong> the fate of these processes and <strong>in</strong>struments after the
article on the f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>gs they enabled has been written: they are transcended, perhaps licensed to
another for further use, perhaps simply discarded. Why are we so different about our electronic
data Would it be enough for humanistic scholars as well to draw their conclusions and let it go
either to be developed by someone else or to mildew Or is there someth<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>herently
different <strong>in</strong> the nature of our data, that we should be so attached to its survival For example,
we expect to receive credit for scholarly editions—why should we not receive it for digital
scholarly editions Are the data collections created by humanists <strong>in</strong>herently more accessible
and open than an experimental physicist’s algorithm or shade-tree spectroscope (Edmond and
Schreibman 2010)
In addition to the unique nature of humanities data, Edmond and Schreibman agreed with Borgman
that there were many challenges to data reuse even beyond the frequently cited problem of <strong>in</strong>tellectual
property rights. They stated that once a scholar’s colleagues and friends had looked at a digital project,
the actual exploration and reuse of digital project materials was typically very low. Edmond and
Schreibman speculated that the organization of a digital data set or collection might appear to be too
“powerful an act of editorialism” to many scholars for them to believe more orig<strong>in</strong>al <strong>in</strong>vestigation
could be conducted with the same materials. They also suggested, however, that the lack of
<strong>in</strong>frastructure to communicate about digital works may be greatly h<strong>in</strong>der<strong>in</strong>g their reuse. “Stripped of
publishers’ lists, of their market<strong>in</strong>g channels and peer review and quality control systems,” they
wondered, “are we fail<strong>in</strong>g the next generation of scholars by creat<strong>in</strong>g too many resources <strong>in</strong> the wild”
(Edmond and Schreibman 2010).
The lack of formal dissem<strong>in</strong>ation and communication channels to promote digital resources is
particularly problematic because of the sheer amount of potentially relevant (as well as irrelevant) data
and tools that are available onl<strong>in</strong>e. While the challenges of this data deluge are often discussed,
particularly <strong>in</strong> terms of e-science, Stuart Dunn has suggested that for the digital humanities a more apt
term might be the “complexity deluge”:
Driven by <strong>in</strong>creased availability of relatively cheap digitization technologies and the
development of software tools that support both exist<strong>in</strong>g research tasks and wholly new ones,