Blog Post 2: Data and Digitization

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 With the use of data modeling, it helps you start to understand and identify what format things will have. Data needs to be consistent, accurate, complete, valid, and uniform but with humanities data that can become hard.  As the book states, "The materials that remain from the past are by definition incomplete, sometimes ambiguous" (Pg. 23). With using data spreadsheets is a popular way to store and analyze structured data. With digitization the book states that "Many analog and digital forms of data in the humanities are used for non-networked purposes" (Pg. 34). The project I'm doing is The Orlando Project. From 2006 to 2021 the Orlando Project has had a continuing experiment in the digital literary history. They now have something called the Orlando textbase that sorts historic women into the story of literary history differently based on the priorities of the person using the textbase. You need data modeling and digitization to get something like a textbase to work. As it says in the book, "Data are the basic units of almost all digital work" (Pg. 27). The Orlando Project needed the use of data modeling to get the Orlando textbase up and running. Digitization helps with the file formats of your digital project. It is important to make informed decisions about your file formats when it comes to the short and long-term success of your digital project. The project over time has changed technically and that's with the help of data modeling and digitization. There are more than 150 contributors and a lot of them are students. The earliest backend system that was created and supported by the team was replaced by a better and more generalized infrastructure that will help have a broader collaboration that can help with women's writing all over the world. This infrastructure helps women host sites that can help them show their work.  

Comments

  1. Dr. MFebruary 4, 2024 at 3:04 PM

    Such an important project, I'm glad you're taking that one on. Sounds like you have a good start with how these building blocks fit into this work.

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  2. Sydney VlachFebruary 5, 2024 at 9:57 PM

    I like how you start, right off the bat, in clarifying that data can be difficult to make concise, structured, and uniform because of the flexible, and sometimes ambiguous, nature of humanities work. This concept seems to fit with your project well, as it seems like you will be managing skills in both data formatting and digitization; by learning about the fluid processes that keep the Orlando Project's database running and uploading/ analyzing file formats, respectively. That sounds like a fun project and I bet many female writers will appreciate the learning you're doing to support their work!

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