Tony Guidone’s presentation went more in depth with the topic of keyword searching, and he offered a more detailed idea of the drawbacks and the benefits that key word searching provide. Text searching has changed the way people interact with information both academically, and in other more recreational, simple ways. The entire concept of Google is based on keyword searching. But in terms of its academic impact, keyword searching has made it much easier for people to interact with old historical artifacts and use it in a way that’s “smarter not harder”. With keyword searching, there is no need to read an entire source to find what you’re looking for. This does significantly create social change because it alters the relationship regular people, not just scholars, have with digital projects and digital data in general. However, even though there is accessibility gained in keyword searching, there’s also things that are lost. For example, the original reading experience and the context that comes with reading and examining a whole work is lost because the reader is only looking for what they need, and thus is only being shown results that serve their research purposes.
In a blog post done by Miriam Posner in which she writes about a presentation she gave regarding Humanities Data 1 , she explains the importance of data and it is evident that keyword searching plays a vital part in her research. However, she emphasizes the individual and their interpretation of the data that’s analyzed. What is obvious through both of these presentations is that research, digital data, and the humanities are deeply intertwines, and the relationship between the three things are only continuing to change with evolving technology and the way users choose to interact with it.
