What happens when institutions and archives are 'decentred' in favour of the individual? What changes when we examine the world through the collected fragments of knowledge that we can recover about a single person, reorganised as a biographical narrative, rather than as part of an archival system?
Tim Hitchcock, ‘Digital Searching and the Re-formulation of Historical Knowledge’, in Mark Greengrass and Lorna Hughes (eds), The Virtual Representation of the Past, Ashgate, Farnham, UK, 2008, p. 90.
What I wonder is whether instead we can begin with the data, or with a datum, and simply watch for what it may tell us, even if what it tells us is simply a story.
Amanda French, ‘In Praise of Humanities Data’
http://www.scribd.com/doc/50066437/In-Praise-of-Humanities-Data
Humans, presented with pieces of information about people, put things into the form of a story. They need not be simple stories, for we know how to deal with unexplained lapses of time, flashbacks, and overlapping narratives. We know how to imagine, infer, things happening at the same time in different places. Film and television train all of us at early ages to weave strands of narrative out of intentional (if carefully constructed) confusion and to take pleasure in that weaving.
Edward Ayers, ‘History in Hypertext’
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/Ayers.OAH.html
even isolated and inert pieces of evidence – a list, a letter, a map, a picture – can assume new and unimagined meanings when placed in juxtaposition with other fragments.
Edward Ayers, ‘History in Hypertext’
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/Ayers.OAH.html
The Old Bailey, like the Naked City, has eight million stories. Accessing those stories involves understanding trial length, numbers of instances of poisoning, and rates of bigamy. But being stories, they find their more salient expression in the weightier motifs of the human condition: justice, revenge, dishonor, loss, trial. This is what the humanities are about. This is the only reason for an historian to fire up Mathematica or for a student trained in French literature to get into Java.
Stephen Ramsay, ‘Prison Art’
http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/06/10/prison-art.html
‘These computational methods, which allow us to find patterns, determine relationships, categorize documents, and extract information from massive corpuses, will form the basis for new tools for research in the humanities and other disciplines in the coming decade.’
Dan Cohen, ‘From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections’
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march06/cohen/03cohen.html
