Laura Crossley’s presentation was informative and engaging. It did a good job of outline the ups and down of the digital research space. Her research question was about the representative nature of blogging and whether or not it was still an appropriate way to disseminate information about the digital humanity space as peer reviewed journals and about these subjects become more readily available.
She introduced discourse about the permanence of the scholarship that is done on line, and I found this to be a particularly relevant critique of digital media particularly in this new information age. DH Now is run on a stable platform that is actively managed, but for websites that not well preserved and articles that are older issues of dead links are always top of mind. There is not singular united way to preserve digital scholarship appropriately in the case of a blog or website being abandoned. Part of the appeal of blogging as a complement to traditional scholarship is the free flow of information. In this presentation in particular Crossley mentioned that she was only analyzing links that were not restricted behind paywalls. The internet itself “has more archival information than scholars have ever had access to” 1This of course highlights the ways in which the internet has democratized the spread and use of information for people who cannot afford to be pay for access to journals.
Lastly, in her text modeling she spoke at length about the ways that topics modeling helped her to see certain trends in word usage while also highlighting the distribution and coherence in word use over time as well the extremely common and closely related vocabulary. It seems that although there are certainly subsections within the digital humanities space, the overall conversations that are happening are rather narrow and untied. I wonder how much of that has to do with the newness of the field and how much of that has to do with the people who are engaging in the scholarship.
