Big data for global history: The transformative promise of digital humanities

Bijdragen en Mededelingen Betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden

Volumn 128, Issue 4, 2013, Pages 55-77

  Van Eijnatten, Joris ^a   Pieters, Toine ^a   Verheul, Jaap ^a  

^a UTRECHT UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84902374604     PISSN: 01650505     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.18352/bmgn-lchr.9350     Document Type: Review

References (70)

1. Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp, 'Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0', 2009, 2; http://hastac.org/node/2182.
2. For an overview of recent trends and discussions in the feld of digital humanities see Amy E. Earhart and Andrew Jewell (eds.), The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor, mi 2011);
3. Matthew K. Gold (ed.), Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis 2012); http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/part/1;
4. Claire Warwick, Melissa M. Terras and Julianne Nyhan, Digital Humanities in Practice (London 2012);
5. Anne Burdick et al. (eds.), Digital-Humanities (Cambridge, MA 2012);
6. David M. Berry (ed.), Understanding Digital Humanities (Houndmills, etc. 2012).
7. 'centerNet | An International Network of Digital Humanities Centers' (10 March 2013), http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/;
8. Marja Makarow, Milena Zic Fuch and Claudine Moulin, Research Infrastructures in the Digital Humanities, Science Policy Briefng (European Science Foundation, 2011);
9. John Unsworth (ed.), Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences (American Council of Learned Societies, 2006).
10. Lunenfeld, Presner and Schnapp, 'Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0'.
11. Burdick et al., Digital-Humanities, vii.
12. Stanley Fish, 'The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality', New York Times 9 January 2012; http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com;
13. Helle Porsdam, 'Too Much "digital", Too Little "Humanities"?: An Attempt to explain why many Humanities Scholars are Reluctant Converts to Digital Humanities' (arcadia@cambridge Publications, 2011), http://arcadiaproject.lib.cam. ac.uk/docs/DigitalHumanities.pdf.
14. Patrik Svensson, 'DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Envisioning the Digital Humanities', Digital Humanities Quarterly 6:1(17 March 2013), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/1/000112/000112.html.
15. Lunenfeld, Presner and Schnapp, 'Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0', 2, 4.
16. See for defnitions of Big Data in a historical context, the Historicizing Big Data Project of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, http://www.mpiwg-berlin. mpg.de/en/research/projects/DeptII-Aronova- Oertzen-Sepkoski-Historicizing.
17. See for instance: J. Gary Knowles, Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues (Los Angeles 2008);
18. Klaus Bruhn Jensen, The Handbook of Media and Communication Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies (New York 2012).
19. Frank Van Vree, De Nederlandse pers en Duitsland, 1930-1939. Een studie over de vorming van de publieke opinie (Groningen 1989);
20. Els Witte, De constructie van België, 1828-1847 (Leuven 2006).
21. For American examples of sampling to chart public debates in magazines see Celeste Michelle Condit, The Meanings of the Gene: Public Debates about Human Heredity, Rhetoric of the Human Sciences (Madison 1999).
22. Recent developments in media history are discussed in Adrian Bingham, 'Reading Newspapers: Cultural Histories of the Popular Press in Britain', History Compass 10 (n. d.) 140-150;
23. Roderick P. Hart and Elvin T. Lim, 'Tracking the Language of Space and Time, 1948-2008', Journal of Contemporary History 46 (2011) 591-609.
24. Peter Jackson and Isabelle Moulinier, Natural Language Processing for Online Applications: Text Retrieval, Extraction and Categorization (Second revised edition; Amsterdam 2007).
25. www.diggingintodata.org; www.catchplus.nl.
26. http://www.clarin. nl/page/about/2; http://biland. nl.
27. http://xta s.science.uva.nl.
28. http://ilps.science.uva.nl/biblio/duoman-dutch-language-online-media- analysis;
29. http://ilps. science.uva.nl/node/735;
30. http://ilps.science.uva.nl/news/knaw-computational-humanities-grant;
31. http://ilps.science.uva.nl/research/projects/bridge;
32. http://www.kitlv.nl/home/Projects?id=25;
33. http://www.project-infniti.nl/;http://politicalmashup.nl/.
34. http://dev.wahsp.nl.
35. D. Odijk et al., 'Semantic Document Selection' (presented at the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, Paphos (Cyprus); Berlin 2012).
36. Stephen Snelders and Toine Pieters, 'The Blue Lotus Revisited: Public Perceptions of Drug Use in the Dutch Empire, c. 1900-1942', in: Drugs and Drink in Asia: New Perspectives from History: Proceedings of the Conference of June 22-23, 2012 (Shanghai n. d.);
37. Marcel De Kort, Tussen patiënt en delinquent. Geschiedenis van het Nederlandse drugsbeleid (Hilversum 1995).
38. Marius Turda, Modernism and Eugenics (New York 2010) 124.
39. Stephen Snelders and Toine Pieters, 'Van degeneratie tot individuele gezondheidsopties. Het maatschappelijk gebruik van erfelijkheidsconcepten in de twintigste eeuw', Gewina 26:4 (2003) 203-215.
40. Stephen Snelders frst elaborated this thesis in Stephen Snelders, 'The Plot against Cancer: Heredity and Cancer in German and Dutch Medicine, 1933-1945', Gesnerus 65 (2008) 42-55.
41. Jan Noordman, Om de kwaliteit van het nageslacht. Eugenetica in Nederland, 1900-1950 (Nijmegen 1989);
42. Snelders and Pieters, 'Van degeneratie tot individuele gezondheidsopties'. Fig 2: Plot of biland search result plus additional word cloud based on kb newspaper repository using query eugenetiek ('eugenics') for 1900-1940, courtesy of José de Kruif (UU; 5-12-2013). The 'bursts' are indicated in red.
43. Huijnen is currently in the process of doing so: http://www.biland.nl.
44. P. Huijnen, F. Laan. M. De Rijke, T. A. Pieters, A Digital Humanities Approach to the History of Science: Eugenics revisited in Hidden Debates by Means of Semantic Text Mining: Histoinformatics (New York 2013).
45. See for instance the classics Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York 1999);
46. Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History (New Brunswick 2008).
47. The concept of reference cultures is being developed in the Translantis project. See translantis.nl for further publications on this topic. Previously, such interactions between cultures are mostly discussed in terms of empire. See for instance Charles S. Maier, Among Empires American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass., London 2007);
48. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ 2010).
49. The role of public opinion in the establishment of empires is discussed in Catherine Hall, Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Reader (Manchester, UK 2000);
50. John M. Mackenzie (ed.), European Empires and the People: Popular Responses to Imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy (Manchester 2011).
51. See for mental maps the classic study: Alan K. Henrikson, 'The Geographical "Mental Maps" of American Foreign Policy Makers', International Political Science Review 1:4 (1980) 495-530.
52. Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley 1993);
53. Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans have loved, hated, and transformed American Culture since World War II (New York 1997);
54. Rob Kroes and Robert W. Rydell, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 (Chicago 2005);
55. Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the us in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill 2000);
56. Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass. 2005);
57. David W. Ellwood, The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (Oxford 2012);
58. Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010 (Cambridge 2012).
59. Jan Bank and Maarten Van Buuren, 1900: The Age of Bourgeois Culture, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective (Basingstoke 2004);
60. Kees Schuyt and Ed Taverne, 1950: Prosperity and Welfare, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective (Basingstoke 2004);
61. Hans Krabbendam, Cornelis A. Van Minnen and Giles Scott-Smith, Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations (Amsterdam, Albany, NY 2009);
62. Johan Schot, Arie Rip and Harry Lintsen, Technology and the Making of the Netherlands: The Age of Contested Modernization, 1890-1970 (Zutphen 2010).
63. For a discussion about the potential of digital humanities to unlock hidden information and developing new knowledge, see also Diane McDonald and Ursula Kelly, 'Value and Benefts of Text Mining', iisc, 14 March 2011, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2012/value-and-benefts-of-text- mining.aspx.
64. www.cbs.nl/; epp. eurostat.ec.europa.eu/;
65. http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/statistics;
66. http://data. un.org/;
67. http://www.wto.org/english/res-e/statis-e/statis-e.htm.
68. For an example of how such statistics information can be used to analyze transatlantic differences and similarities, see Peter Baldwin, The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe are Alike (New York 2011).
69. See for a recent assessment of these limitations, Andrew Prescott, 'Digital Riffs: The Deceptions of Data' (13 January 2013), http://digitalriffs. blogspot. co.uk/2013/01/the-deceptions-of-data.html.
70. Even here change is imminent, see Ann Rigney, 'When the Monograph is no Longer the Medium: Historical Narrative in the Online Age', History and Theory 49 (2010) 100-117.