Second Blog by Gabby

 Data and Digitization in Digital Humanities...👽

    The further along in the textbook I get, the more I question what I really know about Digital Humanities- or maybe I know too much but my ideas are just constantly changing. 

    What we take from human interaction and information we can therefore digitize it through data.

When having these curations through such humanities, 

                                        the data must either be structured or unstructured.

                           Structured                                                                      Unstructured

                                  ^                                                            ^

     composed of entities that are explicit, discrete,                               natural language, is sometimes         

                           and unambiguous                                                           ambiguous and unclear

In the reading, the examples of structured and unstructured data given were beneficial to my extensive learning on the topic. That part of the reading stuck out to me the most because it makes sense in a way to me that I can infer such as structured data is factual and really only had one supposed outcome- whereas unstructured data can be interpreted in different ways with different outcomes.

I also found the example of the "Doe" Family connected through unstructured data to be useful in understanding that "human lives are of long duration and our identities are not singular, uniform, or consistent."

Digital Humanities is not just limited to existing or prior data. We have the ability to construct new data through collaborative efforts-

Something that is difficult in scholarly pieces, simply because we think data is something that has been already collected solely around the regards of one scholar.

Concerning ethical concerns and biases- we must remember that data is something that can be biased simply because it is being collected and distributed to back something up. Learning more about ethical concerns is fascinating to me especially since Digital Humanities is so transparent. However, it is important to know where data is coming from and whether it is being brought into a positive light or not. Regardless, data is something needed for everything and I can see it clearly in my project. 

For my project, I am analyzing The Emily Dickinson Archive, and this project goes deep into the extraction of archival information and how it is digitized to be expanded through the digital world. A lot of Dickinson's writing was left up to interpretation after she died because the poems she did publish, were never under her own name, therefore being an example of unstructured data- left with dates, names, places, etc. This left the poems she left behind in scraps and letters, to need the best digitization for this project to be legible.