Page 63 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

IntroductionChristmas 2016. A perfect time to think back, sum up and publish lists of the main events of the year. Google Trends published the most popular searches grouped into categories such as “News”, “People”, “Technology”, “Films”, “Music”, “Sport” and “Deaths”. A few days earlier the Swedish company Spotify, which provides online access to millions of songs, launched an advertising campaign based on data produced by users. Some of the huge posters plasteredall over the streets of London display messages such as: “Dear person who played ‘Sorry’ 42 times on Valentine’s Day, what did you do?”; or “Dear 3,749 people who streamed ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It’ the day of the Brexit vote, hang in there.”Spotify’s campaign is both surprising and e ective because it plays on the viewer’s engagement. But what has all this got to do with the humanistic disciplines that study documents, texts and images of the past? Or, in other words, how can handling the large amount of data amassed by companies help us gain a better understanding of the limits of our thought, language and historical events – basically all the expressions of our human mind?If we accept that humanistic disciplines suchas philosophy, philology and history are char- acterised not only by a speci c object of study but also by a method that seeks to understand particular, unusual and even unique cases through text commentary, then the answer will no doubt be negative: “nothing, or very little”. However, as Professor Rens Bod (2013) recently argued, since antiquity humanists have also sought general principles, laws and patterns to explain our culture, and have often (for good or for bad) changed how we perceive the world.We should begin by dismissing certain clich s about the humanities and ask ourselves about their classic objects of study, bearing in mindthe methods that are currently available. This requirement is not unrelated to the work of hu- manists, who have always been in contact with other fringe disciplines such as anthropology, Marxism and gender studies. Indeed, in recent years humanists have established a fruitful dialogue with computer studies and the social sciences – which has been called a “computa- tional turn” (Berry, 2011). In this academic con- text, the expression “Big Data” has directly found its way into debates on “scale” – how can we study all the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels written in England, France, Germany, the United States or Japan?; or, more commonly,in a cross-cutting way through concepts more familiar to humanists, such as “distant reading” (Moretti, 2007) or “macroanalysis” (Jockers, 2013).Humanistic disciplines such as philosophy, philology and history are characterised not only by a speci c object of study but also by a method that seeks to understand particular, unusual and even unique cases through text commentary.These changes have been made possible by the fact that statistical and computing methods,as well as other methods related to the social sciences, have been modi ed and have suc- ceeded in adapting their conceptual models to the complexity of texts (English and Underwood, 2016). In other words, we are dealing with a genuine conversation in which the various interlocutors talk and listen to each other.Concerning the particular in the universalThe expression “Big Data” has been spreading in the experimental sciences and the media since 2011, as if an increased amount of available data were the next scienti c breakthrough. The term is used in academia, industry and the media... but what exactly does it mean? Is it an object of study, a method, a group of technologies or a discipline?AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 201763Smart culture. Analysis of digital trends