0.14 The nature of humanities and social science data

The nature of humanities and social science data

Digitizing the products of human culture and society poses intrinsic problems of complexity and scale. Thecomplexity of the record of human cultures—a record that is multilingual, historically specific, geographically dispersed, andoften highly ambiguous in meaning—makes digitization difficult and expensive. Moreover, a critical mass of information is oftennecessary for understanding both the context and the specifics of an artifact or event, and this may include large collections ofmultimedia content: images, text, moving images, audio. Humanities scholars are often concerned with how meaning is created,communicated, manipulated, and perceived. Recent trends in scholarship have broadened the sense of what falls within a givenacademic discipline: for example, scholars who in the past might have worked only with texts now turn to architecture and urbanplanning, art, music, video games, film and television, fashion illustrations, billboards, dance videos, graffiti, andblogs.

The archive of the University of Southern California’s USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History andEducation

The problems of digitizing cultural documents are multiplied when these documents have many audiences. Within thesocial sciences and humanities, there can be numerous subject specialists who want access to the same sources for differentreasons. For example, the Roman de la Rose Project, a stunning digital collection of the major illuminated manuscripts of theRoman de la Rose, a popular medieval literary work,