Tony Guidone brought up an interesting debate I was not previously aware of: digital research versus analog research. I had always figured the digital means of research had usurped the analog means, and that there was no real contention in the matter. Guidone demonstrated that there are two sides to any coin– namely, German coins in the 1930s. He explained that although the web’s improved fluidity of resources enriches researching, there is a loss of physical context that analog researching affords. One must always view the digital data through the eyes of the author; Trevor Owens states as much in his article, describing data sets as a ‘human-made artifact… having the same characteristics as text. Data is created for an audience. Humanists can, and should interpret data as an authored work and the intentions of the author are worth consideration and exploration.’ Guidone simplified this sentiment into more tangible terms: you can’t feel the weight of a coin from a picture, and you can’t feel the material of a newspaper from its transcript. Anyone who creates anything has an agenda, and there is more room for exclusion through a digital medium. 1
Another aspect Guidone brought to my attention was that the web’s astounding ease of access might just serve as a detriment. As Ian Milligan elaborates, ‘in 1998, a year with 67 Canadian history dissertations in the ProQuest dissertation database, the Toronto Star appeared 74 times in that data set; by 2010, it appeared 753 times in a slightly larger data set of 69 dissertations.’ Milligan explains that the Toronto Star went digital. This is an almost 1000% increase in citations– but the Montreal Gazette and the Toronto Telegram, papers that did not go online, ‘remained relatively stagnant’ at a ’16 per cent increase’ and a ’72 per cent decrease’, respectively. The marvellous convenience of the web skews towards resources with the fortune of being digitised, thus biasing researchers to those resources. Milligan posed this as a problem for Canadian historiography and historiography in general, criticising digital databases’ ‘lack of methodological reflection about how these databases work’. 2
- Owens, Trevor. “Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?” Journal of Digital Humanities, March 16, 2012. http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/defining-data-for-humanists-by-trevor-owens/.
- Milligan, Ian. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases, Optical Character Recognition, and Canadian History, 1997–2010.” The Canadian Historical Review 94, no. 4 (November 27, 2013): 540–69.
