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Reading this article towards the end of the semester felt as though it was bringing the class full-circle. At the beginning of the semester I knew very little about the possibilities of data analysis, and was still relatively new to the idea of digital humanities. When Professor Shrout introduced herself as a historian who used coding in her field, I was pretty surprised/intrigued by the concept. This article, as well as the many others we have read this year,  introduced the innumerable and valuable ways in which the digital world and humanities can work together.

For years, we have heard the phrase “don’t trust everything you read on the internet”. However, as the Internet becomes a primary platform for sharing information, the issue now lies less-so in finding sources outside of the internet, and more-so in discriminating between credible and non-credible sources on the web.

In the same way, scholars are hesitant to acknowledge online texts as equal to their physical counterparts. As the authors state, “People who publish in online journals undoubtedly experience more substantial resistance, but the belief that online articles don’t really count seems more and more like the quaint prejudice of age than a substantive critique.” In a new age of sharing data, people are beginning to adapt their review processes in order to cater to the increasingly popular method of digital data distribution.

The professionals who fall under the field of “digital humanities” are also facing some hesitation from others who are not immediately familiar with the relatively new field. “For this group, making their work count is by no means an easy matter.” It would seem that all they contribute (e.g. “digital libraries”, “deep coding of literary texts,” “3-D models of Roman ruins”, “charts and graphs of linguistic phenomena”) are inherently of great value to their fields, but they seem to struggle for scholarly recognition nonetheless. (As my peer said in a previous blog post: “Their efforts to help facilitate the work of professionals… are crucial to their success and yet their work is constantly overlooked and even at times deemed non-scholarly.”)

In seeking to understand the study of digital humanities, I think the authors nail it on the head with their description of theory in the context of digital humanities: “ In the context of history or literary study, “theory” doesn’t predict, but it does explain. It promises deeper understanding of something already given, like historical events or a literary work.To say that software is a theory is to say that digital works convey knowledge the way a theory does, in this more general sense.”