Analyzing Culture with Google Books: An Idea Whose Time Has Come? - Miller-McCune
►http://www.miller-mccune.com/media/culturomics-an-idea-whose-time-has-come-34742
The authors equate size with representativeness and quantity of data with rigor. I am not sure that is true.
Perhaps most disturbing to me is the underlying assumptions of such work about the humanities and about what scholars in the humanities do. One assumption is that the humanities need to be more like science and that we need to be more like scientists — that quantitative knowledge is the only legitimate knowledge and that humanities scholars are therefore not “rigorous.”
Much like the digital versus the long-lost card catalog, such a sweeping tool leaves out the chance juxtapositions and serendipities that often tell us much more than the texts themselves. I spent many years off and on at the British Library reading advertisements in the microfilmed Burney collection of 18th-century newspapers. Now these have been digitized, and I can search for “anatomy lectures” and come up with dozens of hits that took me many eye-straining hours to find. But it cannot tell me that on the previous page, or in the previous issue, there was an ad for a patent medicine, or a live animal combat, or another fascinating bit of 18th-century London life that lends meaning and context to the bare entry.
