Kim Martin – författare

This volume is a collection of essays in which digital methodologies can engage directly with intersectional feminist scholarship. The sheer volume of data available online (primary and secondary source material, social, political, environmental, personal, etc) offers the opportunity to investigate previously inaccessible or otherwise understudied research topics. Recognizing that the web and material that has been digitized to date is biased towards white, middle-to-upper class men, the contributors explore how digital research, broadly conceived, makes room for alternative methods and approaches and opens the conversation to new voices. The true promise of digital methods is being able to tell stories that were previously understudied or otherwise ignored on the basis of class, race, gender, etc. Choices of language, data, platform, and variables reveal researchers’ biases and experiences. By sharing stories about the way they choose to do their work, the contributors to this book can offer a more robustly intersectional approach to data-driven humanities research. They foreground method as our unifying theme, seeking discussions of how methodological choices impact the ways of producing meaning.

Every day, more and more kinds of historical data become available, opening exciting new avenues of inquiry but also new challenges. This updated and expanded book describes and demonstrates the ways these data can be explored to construct cultural heritage knowledge, for research and in teaching and learning. It helps humanities scholars to grasp Big Data in order to do their work, whether that means understanding the underlying algorithms at work in search engines or designing and using their own tools to process large amounts of information.Demonstrating what digital tools have to offer and also what 'digital' does to how we understand the past, the authors introduce the many different tools and developing approaches in Big Data for historical and humanistic scholarship, show how to use them, what to be wary of, and discuss the kinds of questions and new perspectives this new macroscopic perspective opens up. Originally authored 'live' online with ongoing feedback from the wider digital history community, Exploring Big Historical Data breaks new ground and sets the direction for the conversation into the future.Exploring Big Historical Data should be the go-to resource for undergraduate and graduate students confronted by a vast corpus of data, and researchers encountering these methods for the first time. It will also offer a helping hand to the interested individual seeking to make sense of genealogical data or digitized newspapers, and even the local historical society who are trying to see the value in digitizing their holdings.