Digital Methods: Five Challenges

Abstract

While the use of computers for humanities and social science research has a long history1, the immense success of networked personal computing has made both physical machines and software more accessible to scholars. But even more importantly, digital artifacts now populate every corner of post-industrial societies. This means that besides the study of non-digital objects and phenomena with the help of computers, there now is a continuously expanding space of cultural production and social interaction riddled by machine mediation, which has been, from the beginning, tied to digital schemes and formats. An obvious effect of this expansion has been the explosion of material available in digital form. ‘Traditional’ cultural artifacts like books or movies, ‘native’ digital forms such as software programs, online publications or computer games, and a deluge of all kinds of ‘information’ – logged traces of use practices, online interaction, and so forth – contribute to a growing mountain of data begging to be analysed.

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