Data and Digitalization

After reading Chapters 2 and 3 of the textbook I have gotten to dive deeper into the meaning behind Digital Humanities. To begin, data is really hard to describe but it is the "characters" of a certain analysis put into a physical form. Before the data of something had been retrieved and accessed it did exist did not hald any physcial value although it was still technically existent. For example, there is a certain percentage of people that like oranges over apples, but before there was any data on the percent ratio from apples to oranges it wasn't existent of actual value, even though it was still existent. As said in the book "These are acts of remediation by which some feature of an already existing phenomenon is abstracted into a value"(Drucker, 19). There has been plenty of data work done with the project I am analyzing, for example, the whole textbase itself is filled with literary scholars, which is a whole list of data being gathered under one database. 

The chapter about digitalization dives deeper into the online view of documents. Largley looking at HTML which is how documents are displayed. What I did not no was the types of tags that had to go along with HTML to create the type of document needed to relay information however you want to. For example they talked about the upgrade to making styles and the way you can supply it through the tags, when Drucker mentioned that "a particular font or color, for instance, in one section such a feature can be embedded in the <head>"(Drucker, 39). The different ways you can incoperate little things like this along with boarders, margins, and design is very cool and this day and age very rarely thought about. 




Comments

  1. Mackenzie MacEachernSeptember 12, 2022 at 8:41 PM

    Hi, great post! I thought it was so interesting when you made the connection of oranges to apples ratio to describe what you thought data was. It was a great way to put it, I understood exactly what you meant. I also had the same thoughts on data. It felt like numbers, values, or a quantity. Chapter 2 made me rethink the meaning of data in its entirety. It now seems like all information is data. Like a paragraph on the page is data as well as data tables/graphs. Also for HTML, I took a class that I had to use that tool to make a website and it was very tedious. If one wrong space or character is misplaced or incorrect, it does not work. Very frustrating but also it is extremely rewarding when finished.

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  2. Jordan RobichaudSeptember 13, 2022 at 2:15 PM

    This was great, a very complete summary of some of the important parts of the reading. I like how you mentioned the relevance of HTML and design specifics, which are (as you said) rarely thought about in terms of digital humanities, as it is so all-encompassing. Sometimes it can be hard to acknowledge the details.

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