Page 69 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

ConclusionsBibliographySince 2011 the expression “Big Data” has been widely used in the experimental sciences and the media as if the increased amount of available data were the next scienti c breakthrough. Although there is plenty of hype, the humanities have not been una ected by this phenomenon; very speci cally, although the digitisation of our cultural heritage is incomplete, several publica- tions can be found which enter into conversation with Big Data and the social sciences. In Euro- pean academia, there are many notable projects that process large amounts of data in order to study language, literature or art using techniques such as Natural Language Processing, automatic computer vision, topic modelling and stylometry.After analysing the meaning of the expression “Big Data”, this article highlights the cultural nature of data and defends the validity of theories, models and hypotheses for carryingout scienti c research. Lastly, it discusses the dialectic between privacy and control. In a sense, this issue escapes the traditional eld of the humanities, but it also deserves our attention as twenty- rst-century citizens interested in the cultural practices of the present. Humanists no doubt have much to contribute to ethical and epistemological debates on the use of the data generated by citizens, recalling the “captured” and cultural nature of data, and bringing their experience to analysing particular cases bearing in mind the general context.Anderson, Chris (06.23.08). “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scienti c Method Obsolete”. Wired. https://www.wired. com/2008/06/pb-theory/.Berry, D. M. (2011). “The Computational Turn: Thinking about the Digital Humanities”. Culture Machine 12. http://www.culturemachine.net/ index.php/cm/article/viewarticle/440.Blei, David M. (2012). “Probabilistic Topic Models”. Communications of the ACM,55.4: pp. 77–84: http://cacm.acm.org/maga- zines/2012/4/147361-probabilistic-topic-models/ fulltext.Bod, Rens (2013). A New History of the Human- ities. Oxford University Press.Boellstor , Tom (2013). “Making Big Data, in Theory”. First Monday 18.10. http:// rstmonday. org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4869.Bryant, Anthony and Raja, Uzma (2014). “In the Realm of Big Data...” First Monday, 19.2. http:// rstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/ view/4991.Burrows, John (2002). “‘Delta’: a Measure of Stylistic Di erence and a Guide to Likely Author- ship”. Literary and Linguistic Computing 17.3: pp. 267–87.Ciula, Arianna and Eder, Øyvind (2016). “Model- ling in the Digital Humanities: Signs in Context”. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.Drucker, Johanna (2011). “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display”. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 5.1. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/ dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html.AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 201769Smart culture. Analysis of digital trends