Understanding Digital Humanities (david M. Berry) / quote 7 of 16
Computational ‘tools as offering provocations, surfacing evidence, suggesting patterns and structures, or adumbrating trends
Further, it is not merely the quantification of research which was traditionally qualitative that is offered with these approaches. Rather, as Unsworth argues, we should think of these computational ‘tools as offering provocations, surfacing evidence, suggesting patterns and structures, or adumbrating trends’ (Unsworth, quoted in Clement et al. 2008). For example, the methods of ‘cultural analytics’ make it possible, through the use of quantitative computational techniques, to understand and follow large-scale cultural, social and political processes for research projects – that is, it offers massive amounts of literary or visual data analysis (see Manovich and Douglas 2009). This is a distinction that Moretti (2007) referred to as distant versus close readings of texts. As he points out, the traditional humanities focuses on a ‘minimal fraction of the literary field’, ... still less than one per cent of the novels that were actually published ... – and close reading won’t help here, a novel a day every day of the year would take a century or so. ... a field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases, because ... it’s a collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole.