My Deathly Dataset

The topic for my dataset is one of the biggest topics in everyone’s lives, but gets talked about too little in proportion to its significance, probably due to the difficulty many have with it: death.  Of course, since there are so many differently angles from which death can be discussed, this prompted me to try and include as many of these angles as possible in my dataset.  For example:

-        Witnesses to death

-        The afterlife

-        Justifications for death

-        Murder

-        Suicide

-        Genocide

-        War

-        The bereaved

Because of this sprawling approach to the topic, I decided that I would focus on the literature, film, painting, history, etc. that I have already studied and collected in my life.  While I of course have prior familiarity with all of them, I have never made a concerted effort to look at this common thread through these materials as a whole.  As such, it was interesting to see the variety of works I knew that I could bring into this dataset.  I can’t say that I ever thought I would be grouping together Beetlejuice, the Bible, the Zodiac Killer, and Yukio Mishima.

As an American who grew up in North Carolina, Finland, and Ohio, I unsurprisingly have a more-or-less Eurocentric viewpoint that heavily biased my dataset to works from, the history of, and the predominant religions of Europe and the Americas.  Because of this, I did make a concerted effort to draw on my background in Asian Studies, as well as my ongoing self-education in international politics, news, and history, to bring in works, images, and events from the world outside of Europe and the Americas.  This was not too difficult when it came to Asia, since I have made concerted studies in that area, but I still feel that Africa and Oceania are not as represented as I would have liked for them to be, as well as parts of South America, since I am more familiar with North and Central America.  This dearth is especially true of religious works, images, and events, as I am nowhere near as familiar with non-Eurocentric religions as I would like to be.

The majority of my materials were found on Wikipedia (as well as other Wikimedia Commons sites), Project Gutenberg, Google Books, sing365.com, IMSDb, and darklyrics.com.  The rest were all found on various blogs and other web sites via searching on Google.  And I must mention, I do wish Google Books had better support for downloading plain text files, as I found two medieval works I wanted from there to be illegible when I used OCR on the PDFs I downloaded.  And if it weren’t such a time-consuming pain (and if it weren't for half of them being on blu-ray, which has horrendous DRM), I would have loved to rip many of the films I own on disc to have included in my dataset; instead, I’m settling on just the scripts.

To download a copy of my dataset as a zip file, click here.

Collaboration in the Digital Humanities: Truly New, or Pulling Back the Curtain?

Welcome to the inaugural post of my blog on the digital humanities, DH Deluge (a nod to my long defunct creative writing blog, Oneiric Deluge).  Although the layout may be a bit clunky for now, I hope to get more into the guts of this thing and make it a bit more attractive in the future.  In the meantime, hopefully the content will be enough to draw you in. ;)  And now, to move onto that content!

I recently saw an intriguing thought on the @dh+lib Twitter (technically, it was a re-tweet, originally posted by @coblezc): "What's new about DH [digital humanities] is that work is done collaboratively, but many humanities scholars want to work independently." (It had two hashtags, I removed them, as they didn't really add to the content of the tweet; deal with it.)  While I definitely agree with the sentiment that scholars in the humanities do prefer doing their research independently, or at least claiming it independently (I mean, who doesn’t want to be able to say, “This is my work, and I did it without anybody else’s help!”), I must question whether the collaborative nature of work in the digital humanities is truly something new.

Much research in the humanities is conducted the same way: a variety of sources are gathered, be the primary, secondary, tertiary, etc., and those resources are then used to cite precedence and examples, to point out support amongst other scholars, to point out the mistakes others before have made.  For this type of research to be legitimate, those sources must come from someone other than yourself; thus there is an inherent collaborative nature to the research we’ve always been doing.  A humanities scholar cannot simply go out and observe “humanities in action” the way a geologist might go out and study rocks directly; but even then, the geologist himself is only able to practice his craft because of the work others have done before him in his field.  Truly, any research is to some degree built on inherited knowledge, with us standing on the shoulders of our predecessors.  Or perhaps stamping on them.  Or leaping off of them into a ravine.  It varies from situation to situation.

Now, I’m sure some might say that this is not the point of the quote above: it is more about direct collaboration in the humanities, scholars working with each other in ways that the humanities has not allowed before, be it because of impracticability, social stigma, or what have you.  To that I would say that anyone who believes the digital humanities is encouraging direct communication is to some degree a fool.  It is no more direct than collaboration by letter, by telephone, by telegram has been: there is still the artificial intermediary brokering the deals amongst the scholars.  All that digital technology has done is speed up modes of indirect communication to such a degree that it gives a false impression that the collaborators exist in the same space.

However, I would still say that there is something new that digital humanities has brought to the collaborative nature of humanities research: transparency.  Whereas before we could so easily hide the fact that we weren’t generating our works in private rooms we occupied one-to-a-person, within which our ideas were born inside of minds working all on their very own, hiding our collaborations behind citations and private correspondences, digital technology has shown that none of our rooms really had any locks on them— and our collaborative nature has been laid bare for all the world to see.